tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714Sat, 17 Mar 2018 12:33:12 +0000http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif#change11ConnectivismShakespeareconnectedcoursesHalf an HourA place to write, half an hour, every day, just for me.https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)Blogger1011125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-8281833169600995936Sun, 11 Mar 2018 23:53:00 +00002018-03-11T20:01:20.589-04:00Building a BlockchainWe've all heard about blockchains, but what are they? It can be a complicated concept. The best way to learn, of course, is to roll up your sleeves and build a blockchain engine. That's what I did.<br /><br />I followed the example from Daniel van Flymen called<time datetime="2017-09-24T20:06:20.685Z"></time> <a href="https://hackernoon.com/learn-blockchains-by-building-one-117428612f46">Learn Blockchains by Building&nbsp;One</a> on HackerNoon. Now I'm not going to do what he did in this article; if you want to follow the code line by line, go there.<br /><br />What I'm going to describe here is what I learned. If you read it you won't <i>know</i> blockchains. But if I'm sufficiently clear you should come away knowing something.<br /><br /><i>Current Transactions</i><br /><br />A transaction is exactly what you think it is. "John pays Fred five dollars." The blockchain I created kept transactions very simply, but you could imagine how they can be more complex. "University of Downes awards Fred McGuire a Logic badge." Or anything.<br /><i> </i><br />Our blockchain engine keeps a <i>list</i> of current transactions. Each item in the list is a separate transaction. It's nothing fancier than that.<br /><br /><i>Block</i><br /><br />Once our list of current transactions gets long enough (however you want to define that) we gather them together into a block. A block is, then, a list of transactions.<br /><i> </i><br />We also add some other properties to the block so we can keep track of it. We give the block an index number. We give it a timestamp depending on then it was created. When we put our transactions into a block, we'll have a record of them.<br /><br />We could just keep a list of blocks. But then anyone could change the previous transactions. So we want to prevent people from changing earlier transactions by locking them into our block, and we want to create a <i>chain</i> of transactions so that new transactions are only added to the end of the chain.<br /><br /><i>Starting</i><br /><br />We create an empty block as a starting point. We give it an index number of zero and a value we'll call a 'proof of work' of 1 (this number doesn't matter; it could be anything) and a 'previous hash' of 100 (again, the number doesn't matter). We give it a timestamp and an empty list of transactions.<br /><i> </i><br /><i>Mining</i><br /><br />Next, I want to create some transactions and store them in a new block. It will be the second block in our chain. By creating the second block, I will lock in all the changes in the first block so nobody can change it.<br /><br />So here's how it works: I get the previous block, and I get the value for the 'proof of work' from the previous block. Then, using the last proof, I create a <i>new</i> proof of work for <i>this</i> block. I will create it by taking the old proof of work and solving a cryptographic puzzle for it. This is called 'mining'.<br /><br />In my blockchain the puzzle is very simple. I take the old proof of work and attach a new value to the end of it. I start with '0'. So if the old proof of work was '1' then I create a string '10'. Then I encrypt my string, which produces a long output string, like this:<code> b5ua881ui4pzws3O03/p9ZIm4n0=</code><br /><br />The puzzle I'm trying to solve is this: find a new proof of work so that encrypting the string produces an output string that begins with '0000'. My very simple system keeps trying numbers until it gets the answer. If '0' didn't work, try '1'. If '1' didn't work, try '2'. And so on. In my system, the new proof of work was something like 726,095.<br /><br />That's a lot of computing. I had to create 726,095 different encryptions until I found the right one. In real blockchains, the challenge might be even more difficult. That's why it takes so much power to mine bitcoins. They're solving problems like this to create proofs of work.<br /><br /><i>Hashing</i><br /><br />Once I've obtained my new proof of work, I can create my new block. I give the block an index number. I give it a timestamp depending on then it was created. I put the list of transactions into it. Then I add the proof of work to it.<br /><br />Finally, I want to link it to the previous block. I do this by creating a 'hash' of the previous block. I do this by encrypting the block using the same sort of encryption I used to create the proof of work. The encryption produces a long string, just like before, say, <br /><pre><code>47DEQpj8HBSa+/TImW+5JCeuQeRkm5NMpJWZG3hSuFU=</code></pre><br />This long string is called a 'hash'. It's a one-way encryption; I can generate a hash out of my content, but I can't generate my content out of my hash. The hash is also unique to my content. If you changed one digit of my content, you'd change the hash. So that locks the previous content. I take this string, call it the 'previous hash', and add it to my block.<br /><br />My block is done. But the story isn't over.<br /><br /><i>Validating</i><br /><br />Although it's very hard to create a new block, it's very easy to prove that the new block is valid.<br /><br />First we check the proof of work. It's very easy to check because we know what it is. We create the string, encrypt the string, and check to make sure it starts with '0000'.<br /><br />Then we check the hash. We do this by encrypting the previous block and checking our result against the one in the block. If they match, the has is valid.<br /><br />If the block passes both tests, it's valid.<br /><br /><i>Nodes</i><br /><br />If I were building a one-server system, I'd be done. But the list of transactions needs to be shared with other people. Also, we want other people to be able to create their own transactions.<br /><i> </i><br />To share my blockchain, I create a service so that anyone who requests it can receive the full structure of the blockchain from me. It will contain one or more blocks, where each block has a list of transaction, and where each block is chained to the previous block by means of the proof of work and the hash of the previous block.<br /><br />Now I need a list of other servers. They will each have the same blockchain engine I have. They will set up the same way I did. And when they're ready they send a command to my system to 'register' as a blockchain engine. In my system, I keep a list of these nodes (if I wanted, I could also share it).<br /><br />Notice that there's no centralized list of nodes. We don't need it. Each node (including me) keeps its own list of nodes.<br /><br />We also each have our own blockchain. So which one is the right one?<br /><br /><i>Resolving Conflicts</i><br /><br />There are different ways of resolving conflicts. We chose a very simple one: compare two blockchains. Whichever blockchain is the longest is the official blockchain.<br /><br />So when I want to make sure I have the most up-to-date blockchain, therefore, I check the chain at each node, one by one. If the chain is longer at the node, I replace my blockchain with the one I found at the node. I keep going until I've finished nodes.<br /><br />If everybody does this, we arrive at a consensus. This consensus reflects the history of all the transactions in the system - the exchanges of money, the recording of contracts, whatever.<br /><br /><i>Coins</i><br /><br />In a financial system like Bitcoin, all transactions are executed in 'coins'. Where do the coins come from? They are created as a reward for mining. In our system, for each block you mine, you receive one coin.<br /><br />We can also exchange coins (and record these as transactions) for anything we want. So I could sell my coins, I could trade my coins for goods or services, whatever. This depends only on the willingness of someone else to accept my coins.<br /><br />What makes my coins valuable is that they're scarce. They can only be obtained by mining, and mining gets harder and harder as the blocks get bigger (it can also be made harder by design, which is what Bitcoin did). So instead of setting up a computer and mining your own coins, you might find it easier to buy one from me.<br /><br />But note that we don't <i>have</i> to use coins. We could simply agree to use this as a distributed record-keeping system. But we'd also have to agree to pay our fair share of the costs of keeping it running.<br /><br /><i>Complexity</i><br /><br />As I mentioned, this is a simple blockchain system. We could make it a lot more complex in a variety of ways.<br /><i> </i><br />For one thing, we need to make sure we don't release our current transactions too early. We need to make sure they're locked into the blockchain somewhere, even if someone else's blockchain was longer and took precedence. One way to do this is to notify other nodes of the transactions as they occur. In some blockchains they wait until the transactions are ten blocks deep into the system before releasing their local copies of current transactions.&nbsp; <br /><br />Another thing we need to do is to create identities for the people conducting the transactions. So a node might have a list of accounts, such that these accounts are listed as the ones conducting the transaction. I might have an identity like @downes@downes.blockchain or some such thing.<br /><br />I might also want to check to be sure whether a person is entitled to make a transaction before entering it into my system. If, for example,&nbsp;@downes@downes.blockchain wants to transfer 1,000 coins to someone, there needs to be a history of transactions for&nbsp; @downes@downes.blockchain such that he has more than 1,000 coins to transfer.<br /><br />In the case of other types of transactions, other types of checks would need to be made. Only accredited institutions should grant degrees, for example. Only reputable agencies should grant badges. How is this accomplished? Ideally, it is built into the system, so that participation in a biven blockchain network constitutes agreement regarding the constraints on transactions.<br /><br />The nature of the encryption challenge in the mining process could also be changed. The main condition is that it should be hard to solve but easy to check, and any number of one-way functions and algorithms fit the bill. There needs, however, to be a balance between how hard it is to solve and how quickly we can create new blocks.<br /><br />Also, to arrive at a consensus, I <i>could</i> check every other node, but why would I want to? If I know that Frank checks all the other nodes, I could just check with Frank. In a network we can propagate from end to end by checking only a few nodes, provided we do it right. <br /><br /><i>Finally</i><br /><br />This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many issues with my own application, as well as the Flymen example cited above. <i>But</i> if you've understood this article up to this point, you understand blockchains.<br /><br />If you want to see my code you can check it out at GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/Downes/blockchain">https://github.com/Downes/blockchain</a> <br /><br />I have an endpoint running just for fun at <a href="http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/app.cgi">http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/app.cgi</a> and yes you could add your node to the system. But remember. Just for fun. :)https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2018/03/building-blockchain.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-1495680024033615855Tue, 27 Feb 2018 16:41:00 +00002018-02-27T11:43:18.938-05:00Engagement in a Time of Polarization<i>I'm preserving my contributions to <a href="https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:DavidsonX+DavNowX_Polarization+1T2018/discussion/forum/a47bc804bca2e24d73b4b1159c0b4b670d2cbd00/threads/5a85a6ea84452a082a00104e">this online discussion</a> because other people's discussion boards tend to disappear over time. Also, <a href="https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:DavidsonX+DavNowX_Polarization+1T2018/course/">the course</a> is (I think) hidden behind a login.</i><br /><br /><b>A Wider Sense of Polarization, Its Purpose, and Its Resolution&nbsp;</b><br /><br /><div class="post-labels"></div><div class="post-body">I was disappointed in <strike>Tufekci's</strike> <a href="https://hypervisible.com/polarization/power-technology/">Chris Gilliard's paper</a>. It looks at polarization from a very narrow perspective. I think we could have had a much wider discussion of the phenomenon that included, at the very least, some of the following:<br /><ul><li>the use of polarization on radio between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda</li><li>the emphasis on boys only in videogames by the advertising industry, resulting in a gender bias in tech</li><li>polarization over slavery prior to the U.S. civil war</li><li>the Nazi's use of polarization in German society</li><li>religious polarization in Northern Ireland</li><li>manufactured polarization between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party by the apartheid South African government</li><li>the fallacy of the false dilemma in philosophical discourse</li><li>the exploitation of divisions between Sunni and Shiite in Syria and Iraq</li></ul>What these examples should tell us very clearly is the following:<br /><ul><li>there is little, if any, distinction between digital and non-digital polarization</li><li>polarization is caused by many technologies and not just social media, and not, therefore, by properties unique to social media</li><li>polarization is not only used by the rich to divide the poor; it is used by fanatics of all stripes</li><li>it is not always based on race, and when it is, the 'races' in question are often artificial constructs</li><li>the truth (or justice, or value, or resolution, or whatever) is not always in the middle</li></ul>With respect to the resolution of polarization, the terms of engagement vary<br /><ul><li>it's not about compromise; you can't stop being Zulu, you can't accept some aspects of slavery</li><li>the issue isn't engagement per se, but rather, is other a third party that is manipulating engagement</li><li>there's a fine line between recognizing injustices of the past (as in Reconciliation) and explitiung them (as in the Tufekci reference to the "poisonous tree")</li><li>there have to be rules of engagement, and sometimes these rules exclude certain objectives, expressions and points of view (specifically, those that demean, belittle, or advocate violence against others)</li></ul>I still haven't found better means of addressing polarization than those I have espoused in the past: autonomy, diversity, openness, and interactivity.<br /><br /><br /><b>Dave Cormier's Response</b><br /><br /><br />I'm just wondering which article you are talking about? Are you referring to the video included here or did I miss something?<br /><br />It seems like you're saying that because polarization has existed before and that it has been caused by other technologies (a sound example might be the pamphlets that circulated as the printing press first started to kick ier. n) that there is not a polarization unique to social media. I spent half an hour today telling teachers here in PEI the opposite. It is true that polarization is not 'only' used by the powerful to stay empowered, and is also used by fanatics, but it is its cynical use by the powerful that is particularly disturbing to me.<br /><br />I don't think anyone is suggesting that polarization started 4 years ago. I do sense that engagement has changed in the passed 4 years however. I know many, many colleagues who are tracked and hunted online (many of whom are women) and are afraid to engage in things like openness as a way of addressing polarization. It was differently difficult to silence people in the commons when 'voice' was something that was published and sent around on dead trees. Now their voice in places like twitter can be tracked and responded to with a cynical, purposeful vengeance that shuts down any chance of autonomy, marginalizes diversity, closes openness and makes interactivity a serious risk.<br /><br />that's unique to social media.<br /><br /><b>My Reply</b><br /><br />I think it's actually Chris Gilliard. Maybe. The name was very difficult to find when I was writing the response. <a href="https://hypervisible.com/polarization/power-technology/">https://hypervisible.com/polarization/power-technology/</a>(It's hard to take people seriously as social media experts when they don't even put their full name on their web page).<br /><br />Anyhow. I think you were misinforming PEI teachers. The powerful have <i>always</i> cynically used polarization to get their way. William Randolph Hearst used it to start a war! The British used it to subjugate India. The examples are legion.<br /><br />If there is any difference today, it's at the opposite end of the spectrum. Fringe groups and fanatics have an easier time leveraging polarization than they used to. But what we've seen is that this, too, is co-opted by the rich and powerful. Eg. witness the Russians taking over the business of far right trolling.<br /><br />People have been tracked and haunted forever. Think of McCarthyism. Think of the Stasi. Think of the KKK. When publishing was dead-tree only, it was very easy to control the voice of the people. As we used to say in the Canadian University Press, "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the presses." I spent what felt like a lifetime defending the underground press in the pre-internet era. Yes there were zines and pamphlets and the like. But vengeance-free activism? No such luck.<br /><br />Again, in social media, if there is anything different, it's at the other end of the scale. It's easier to be anonymous online. You could not possibly reach a country or a planet without everyone knowing who you were in the pre-internet era. But now, we <i>can</i> have a Banksy. We <i>can</i> have an Anonymous. <br />If you're thinking of activities that used to be closed, like classrooms and club meetings, yes, that's changed. But that's not social media, that's digital video recorders. You can still have privacy if you ban cameras. But yeah, it's harder.<br /><br />But we could never have classes or meetings that extended beyond the bounds of a room or a community. There really wasn't such a thing as distance classrooms (the interaction in distance education was 99% one-to-one). So we have a new capacity to have online classes, but this capacity is accompanied by online digital recording.<br /><br />But if you don't think things like outing and doxxing and trolling and leaking of secrets existed before social media, or even before the internet, then you're mistaken. Think of Alan Turing. Think of the Pentagon Papers. Think of Matthew Shepard. Even the attacks on Kathy Sierra happened before social media (it was 11 years ago).<br /><br />The main reason I linger on this is to stress and underline that responses unique to social media will not address the issue, because they will be too narrow and not address root causes. We have in fact always tolerated the sort of behaviour that people today are finding appalling when in clear view on social media. Understanding this will help us understand what's going wrong with social media, and society in general, and will more likely lead us to a positive outcome.<br /><br /><i>There were some <a href="https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:DavidsonX+DavNowX_Polarization+1T2018/discussion/forum/a47bc804bca2e24d73b4b1159c0b4b670d2cbd00/threads/5a85a6ea84452a082a00104e">other responses</a> to this thread, which I read and found interesting and worthwhile.&nbsp;</i><br /><br /><b>From Bonnie Stewart</b><br /><br />So thinking about your point, Stephen, re "there have to be rules of engagement, and sometimes these rules exclude certain objectives, expressions and points of view (specifically, those that demean, belittle, or advocate violence against others)" - how do we get to those rules in a diverse society where we don't have shared channels of communications or (maybe?) shared concepts of reality? The us/them thinking extends back before social media and the internet and has precedents throughout history, but our current form of political engagement relies heavily on media for truth-making and media itself is both polarized AND benefits across the board from the creation of us/them stories. So what channels can we use to set those rules?&nbsp; <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://mikecaulfield.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/ripinpieceso4chanstartedsomeprojectwiththe_7a88fa_5283146.png?w=676" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="431" data-original-width="676" height="255" src="https://mikecaulfield.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/ripinpieceso4chanstartedsomeprojectwiththe_7a88fa_5283146.png?w=676" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><b>Problems With Four Moves</b><br /><i>(Me again, starting a different thread)</i><br /><i></i><br /><br /><div class="post-body">While I appreciate Mike Caulfield's intent in <a href="https://hapgood.us/2018/02/18/recognition-is-futile-why-checklist-approaches-to-information-literacy-fail-and-what-to-do-about-it/">offering this process</a>, and while it offers some valuable suggestions, I am concerned that it is not an appropriate mechanism for critically evaluating online reports.<br /><br />I am most concerned about approaches based on evaluating the credibility of a source. I think it's really hard to determine whether a source in general is credible, and additionally, whether a particular report in an otherwise credible source is credible.<br /><br />For example, <a href="https://prod-edxapp.edx-cdn.org/assets/courseware/v1/163253964bd42d380cb5792bc4c6e530/asset-v1:DavidsonX+DavNowX_Polarization+1T2018+type@asset+block/Caulfield_s_4_Moves.png">the infographic</a> includes news coverage as being among trusted sources. When I taught critical thinking I would use news articles in my classes as examples of <i>unreliable</i> sources. My class and I would analyze the evidence of bias in source selection, poorly constructed arguments and explanations, factual errors, and more. These persisted across editorials, letters to the editor, columnists and news coverage.<br /><br />The first 'move' is always to determine what is being said, how it is being supported, and what the evidence there is for it (if any). This allows us to make a preliminary assessment. When we identify invalid argumentation, informal fallacies, equivocation and ambiguity, and weak explanations we should begin to question the source, no matter how credible it is.<br /><br />The second move is to check the assertions of fact against what we already know. For example, think of the child who was told "Australia is not a country" by a teacher. Our own factual knowledge is not perfect, of course, and we should always be open to other possibilities. But assertions contrary to our own everyday experience and common sense should be questioned.<br /><br />If the assertion has survived to this point (and a painfully large number of assertions do not) then then next step is to confirm or verify the assertions. These vary depending on the type of argument or explanation, and the standards also vary. A statement of fact needs observers or tangible consequences; a statistical generalization needs a sufficiently large representative sample. The method of 'going to the source' is one way of doing this, but the purpose here isn't to assess the source, it's to assess the <i>evidence</i>.<br /><br />In journalism, the standard rule (often broken) is that a fact is not published unless it is verified by two independent sources that were in a position to know. There is also what Carnap called the 'requirement of total evidence', which means that a narrow view or single perspective shouldn't be trusted. We need to avoid 'conformation bias', where we are considering only those sources or arguments favourable to our own beliefs.<br /><br />Finally, yes, you should be self-aware, but ultimately, your own reaction to the story is irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether it makes you happy or angry. It's not that you should be dispassionate - "Reason," said Hume, "is and ought to be the slave of the passions." If something matters to you, there is all the more reason why you want to make sure you have it right.<br /><br />There's a lot more to evaluating news and opinions than I've outlined here, but these should point you in the right direction. My rules, in summary: Question authority. Trust yourself. Avoid errors in reasoning. Verify.</div><br /><br /></div>https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2018/02/engagement-in-time-of-polarization.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-8633082147204446093Fri, 16 Feb 2018 13:29:00 +00002018-02-16T08:29:40.852-05:00Re: Prime Minister Trudeau’s Bad Balance Sheets are Bad News for Canada<i>Responding to John Reid, <a href="http://cata.ca/2018/bad-balance-sheets/">Prime Minister Trudeau’s Bad Balance Sheets are Bad News for Canada</a>.</i><br /><br /><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings></xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> 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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="page number"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="endnote reference"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="endnote text"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="table of authorities"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="macro"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toa heading"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="List"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="List Bullet"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="List Number"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="List 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="List 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Name="Title"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Closing"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Signature"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Body Text"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Body Text Indent"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="List Continue"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="List Continue 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="List Continue 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="List Continue 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="List Continue 5"/> <w:LsdException 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Name="List Table 4 Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Mention"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Smart Hyperlink"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Hashtag"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Unresolved Mention"/> </w:LatentStyles></xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]><style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style><![endif]--> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">As the representative of Canada’s innovation sector you have a responsibility to promote the good of the industry as a whole. This column does not do that, and if the recommendations were followed, would result in significant harm to the industry. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The major thread in your post is that Canada should eliminate deficit spending and reduce the debt. This is questionable advice in most circumstances. Were it followed by industry there would be much less growth and innovation, as companies depend on debt in order to finance research, development and growth. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A significant reduction in government spending would have a ripple effect throughout the economy. We see the impact of this already in places like New Brunswick, which spirals deeper into economic blight each time the provincial government heeds advice to curtail spending. Nationally, the cancellation of the government’s $900 million innovation clusters initiative, it’s reduction of R&amp;D investment money, or an increase in corporate taxation, all would have a significant negative impact on industry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The advice is especially off-point at the current moment as the prime interest rate is at historic lows. Government and industry have the opportunity to acquire valuable capital for growth at nearly zero cost to themselves. This is the time to be taking advantage of the situation and financing the necessary human development and infrastructure necessary to be competitive in a modern technological environment. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">You also take the opportunity to criticize the increase in the minimum wage in Ontario, arguing from the loss in January of 59,000 part time jobs in Ontario. The month after the Christmas rush is always a bad month for part-time employment. And there were part-time job losses across Canada, even where minimum wages did not rise. And you don’t mention the gain of 8,500 full time jobs in the same time period. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">But more to the point, a nation cannot grow and develop on the backs of its poorest citizens. Growth and prosperity must be shared across society. The increasing poverty created by a stagnant minimum wage has increased costs at all levels, including the corporate sector, which depends on a health customer base for revenues. We know from previous experience that increases in the minimum wage result in economic growth, not recession.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Finally, there is more to assess in a nation than its balance sheet. Far more valuable measures are the growth, development and happiness of its citizens. The balance sheet cited here does not refer to the assets we are building together as a nation, from light rail in Ottawa to an AI industry in Montreal to an emerging powerhouse economy in Kitchener-Waterloo. As citizens we are among the healthiest and best educated in the world, and this more than any tax break is what creates the advantage for Canadian industry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As a whole your post sounds more like a set of talking points than it does a reasoned economic analysis. It is important to understand the true source of prosperity. The money we invest in ourselves, the wages our industries produce – these are the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reasons</i>we have industry trade and commerce. We work in them and invest in them not as an end in itself, but to make our lives richer and more meaningful. If we fail to accomplish that, the balance sheet is meaningless.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2018/02/re-prime-minister-trudeaus-bad-balance.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-43983810643454727Wed, 31 Jan 2018 21:36:00 +00002018-01-31T16:36:33.869-05:002018 OLDaily SurveyI got 64 responses to my survey, which is a response rate of 0.3 percent, which doesn't seem very high to me, but I've read refereed academic publications based on less robust statistics.<br /><br />Here are the basic results:<br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xXU6KKXyIME/WnImIiQ8JHI/AAAAAAAALak/N1DipfrSjzszdDDNXyRYcontp2yMTy_eQCLcBGAs/s1600/q1.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="779" height="392" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xXU6KKXyIME/WnImIiQ8JHI/AAAAAAAALak/N1DipfrSjzszdDDNXyRYcontp2yMTy_eQCLcBGAs/s640/q1.PNG" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It makes sense that the existing subscribers would be those whose needs are being met by the newsletter, but it's reassuring to see it expressed in a bar graph.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qTeyEMMOKg8/WnImIk7Cj0I/AAAAAAAALag/IPN9ovnn-gkl52Gps1NqEA1TPH-YJDGKQCLcBGAs/s1600/q2.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="486" data-original-width="750" height="414" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qTeyEMMOKg8/WnImIk7Cj0I/AAAAAAAALag/IPN9ovnn-gkl52Gps1NqEA1TPH-YJDGKQCLcBGAs/s640/q2.PNG" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">This isn't a big item for me, but it's one of the questions on the SurveyMonkey default template, and it's the first thing spammers mention ("Your blog is so well designed, ...") so I was a bit curious. I'm mostly not offending the eyes of people but it looks like I might need a bit of an upgrade. Just a bit though.&nbsp; </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-akyVpGWiViY/WnImItA3znI/AAAAAAAALac/Kruf8mNTRNUgTKw3Iqy_0tQ0baX6-YR6QCLcBGAs/s1600/q3.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="482" data-original-width="728" height="422" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-akyVpGWiViY/WnImItA3znI/AAAAAAAALac/Kruf8mNTRNUgTKw3Iqy_0tQ0baX6-YR6QCLcBGAs/s640/q3.PNG" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This one matters because I have two objectives: first, to make things clear, but second, to most definitely <i>not</i> talk down to or dilute the information on the site. It looks like I am succeeding to a degree here.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zAulyMuPJdQ/WnImI0KoWTI/AAAAAAAALao/51CIvYTYxP0a5zY5_jpVe0UKSs9-c0P_ACLcBGAs/s1600/q4.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="461" data-original-width="715" height="412" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zAulyMuPJdQ/WnImI0KoWTI/AAAAAAAALao/51CIvYTYxP0a5zY5_jpVe0UKSs9-c0P_ACLcBGAs/s640/q4.PNG" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This is my top priority for readers. You don't have to <i>agree</i> with me. But you should be confident that I'm not lying to you, making stuff up, or pulling the wool over your eyes. Honesty has its price (I'm not nearly the most popular pundit out there) but trust is its reward.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jVIH2gNiQf0/WnImJC0BaTI/AAAAAAAALas/_m-hccrqEF8pgRaLYmvwnNEzKrXe8HkjgCLcBGAs/s1600/q5.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="876" height="340" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jVIH2gNiQf0/WnImJC0BaTI/AAAAAAAALas/_m-hccrqEF8pgRaLYmvwnNEzKrXe8HkjgCLcBGAs/s640/q5.PNG" width="640" /></a></div><br />Unlike pretty much every other publication in this space I don't blast readers with subscription bubbles, prompts to "like, share and subscribe", and similarly pseudo-viral prompts. That's why I can have an 83 'net promoter' score and remain static in subscription rates.<br /><br />I'm delighted to see that I have 2 detractors in my readership. Well done. Hang in there.<br /><br />The next part of the survey asked how you would improve OLDaily. Many people said it was fine as it was (awww, shucks) but a number of thoughtful comments gave me pause to reflect. Let me summarize some of the common themes (where a 'theme' might actually be one person).<br /><br />- Finding archives and earlier posts - perhaps create an index? Or metadata? I tried to create a page listing the names of the authors on OLDaily and had to do it by had because the page is literally too large to publish automatically. But yeah, a topic index would be useful. Matthias Melcher occasionally creates a category-based listing of my articles (and I am very guiltily aware I haven't implemented his most recent) and I'd like to implement that in the whole newsletter. But meanwhile, the search on my home page is excellent and it creates a URL for each search result, so you could easily create your own index. Maybe I could put a 'last five issues' set of links in the newsletter itself.<br /><br />- Difficulties changing email addresses - the login and subscription system has always been a challenge. I wrote it myself, from scratch, partially because I'm stupid, and partially because I couldn't afford any commercial email management solution. Still can't. But yeah, I want this to be better. You don't notice, but there are also numerous bounces that defy my efforts to track down.File this under 'working on it'.<br /><br />- Recognition for donations. I take the time every year (well, both previous years) to look up and respond individually to each donor, and to make sure they're recognized on the page. I have to dig into the bowels of PayPal to find the information, so I'm slow at doing this (and haven't done it yet this year, though I will).I'm also sorry about using PayPal. I was all set to switch to Patreon for this year, but then they changed their terms and I got cold feet.<br /><br />- Look at the EU more closely. Yeah. I should. I do try, but so much European content is behind subscription walls or paywalls and I just won't link to that. There isn't the same prevalence of individual blogs (with English versions) in Europe as in North America. (As an aside, the place that has just <i>dropped off the map</i> is Australia, as that country's move toward commercialization has resulted in a nation-wide cone of silence descending on its writers (killing EdNA and FLL didn't help).<br /><br />- Typos. Yeah, I know. The problem is that it's really hard for me to see them. I'm trying to create a larger-text version of my interface (or a larger screen). Also, the built-in browser spell-check doesn't work in WYSIWYG content editors (like CK Editor, which I use). I plan to test a CK Editor spell-check plug-in. It won't catch everything, but it will help. There are still issues with the Twitter feed as well.<br /><br />- Sharing. Yes, posts should be easier to share (especially in OLWeekly). But I don't want to fill my newsletter with icon-sized advertisements for Twitter and Facebook. I'm thinking about it and will have something in the next year.<br /><br />- Maybe allow comments? I allowed comments for many years, first with my own system, and then with Disqus. I didn't like the advertising in Disqus. I didn't like the spam in my own system. But more to the point, most of the time, nobody posted anything. That has always been true for me - maybe if I really encouraged it people might respond because they felt they had to, but where is the value in that? I never had a lot of comments, and then comments really dies with the arrival of Facebook and Twitter. Long-term, I think people should have a way to comment on their own site and reference my article (Medium tries to do this, but does it very badly).<br /><br />- Make the direct link to the post I write more prominent. Right. Done. My posts now clearly show [<a href="https://www.moodlenews.com/2018/poodll-av-recording-plugin-for-moodle-gets-deep-into-html5-with-latest-update/">Direct Link</a>] and [<a href="http://www.downes.ca/post/67720">This Post</a>].<br /><br />- Fewer blind text links in my commentary? Nope. Not changing that. You'll always know where the primary link goes, but I want the secondary links to be an act of risk and exploration. <br /><br />- "I find what's published there less "deep" or "revolutionary". It may also be that less blogs are written, that some information is now more mainstream"- I thought for a while about this one. I try hard not to be mainstream and I try to be current and so some mainstream creeps in. If it's all over Twitter I probably don't need to cover it. And yet - I'm conscious that I'm also building a database and I need to include some things (that's also why I need the blind links). <br /><br />- "Some pieces assume a technical expertise beyond my understanding." - yeah. That's not going to change. I try to push my own understanding with my reading and linking, and that's going to overlap onto the readers as well. My best advice is: if it isn't for you, don't read it. Nobody (except me) should read everything in OLDaily. It's not like a book, it's like a newspaper.<br /><br />- (Paraphrased): "It's hard to tell whether something is a resource description or my editorial comment" - I'm conscious of that. I take great pains to try to be clear. When you're reading OLDaily, you should assume it's me speaking unless I say specifically that so-and-so said this. Sometimes I'm thinking aloud, sometimes I'm just describing something for the record. If I'm doing it right, my voice and the autrhor's voice sound like a chord; if I mess it up it's just noise.<br /><br />- More focus on K-12 issues?&nbsp; Yes, good point, and I should. It's hard to navigate the school-blogger scene because of the <i>heavy</i> self-promotion and politics in the area. Also, it's difficult to do <i>online</i> learning in K-12 because so much of K-12 involves supervision as well as education. But those are just excuses, and I'll make an effort.<br /><br />Thanks to everyone for their feedback. I really enjoy producing OLDaily, from the server management to the software design to the research and commenting. It all comes together for me as an unparalleled research environment (one that, quite frankly, breaks all the rules of traditional research).<br /><br />What do <i>I&nbsp; </i>wish I could do to improve OLDaily?<br /><br />- I wish I could focus on it full time. In the back of my mind there's some combination of Patreon and contract work and whatever that allows me to do that.<br /><br />- I want to use the concept to inform my work on MOOCs and personal learning. I am engaged in an unsanctioned software redesign (working on e-learning in defiance of my management) to adapt gRSShopper to do that.<br /><br />- I want to write some longer book-length pieces that pull together some of the major themes from 20 years of work. Again, there's no support whatsoever for this sort of work in my workplace. Again, a Patreon sort of thing might work - but I don't think there's enough support there to pay the actual cost of doing this.<br /><br />- I want to finish and unveil the graph. Part of my theory is that the graph is <i>already</i> created by the interactions of people and resources, and we don't need to use AI to create it for us (we use AI to augment or inform the graph, but we <i>choose for ourselves</i> who we read, who we follow - not by ticking on a box, but through our actions).<br /><br />I'm going to follow up this survey with a survey about the topics that are of interest to people. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2018/01/2018-oldaily-survey.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-4612047101255620583Sun, 17 Dec 2017 13:54:00 +00002017-12-17T08:54:25.052-05:00On the Educause Openness Community Conversations<div class="MsoNormal">In my email today:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px;">As co-leaders of the Educause Openness Constituency Group, we would like to introduce an idea, solicit feedback, and invite you to participate in a planning session for a series of community conversations about openness in higher education.</span><br style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px;" /><br style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px;" /><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px;">The idea is that each month the Openness CG will host a volunteer guest to present and discuss a topic of their choosing on openness in education. The topics could range from discussions about an initiative, an organisation&nbsp; an idea, a new technology, a service, or just about anything else that would be relevant to the Openness CG membership.</span><br style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px;" /><br style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px;" /><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px;">We invite you to contribute your ideas to help shape this initiative. Please feel free to respond to this posting if you like and let us know what you think. We will also schedule a virtual meeting on Wednesday, January 24, from 4-5pm EST where we will give a quick overview of the idea, summarise any feedback and additional ideas that we have received, and listen to feedback.&nbsp;</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">My thoughts. Incomplete, and I’m sure others will have thoughts to add and/or corrections.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">1. General suggestions about presentations (topics, etc.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Topics:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- The Creative Commons Education Platform (review of current state, issues with it, impact)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Open Pedagogy (What is it, how is it applied, why is it important)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Is there really an OER reuse problem (who reuses, how are things reused, scenarios for reuse)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Unexpected stories of openness (line up a half-dozen or more interviewees for this one)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Open pedagogy and public policy – aligning policy with open initiatives (eg open publishing mandates)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Openness and colonialism (is it a thing? How to mitigate the impact? )<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- How open data will/will not change the nature of open educational resources<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Openwrapping (ie, OER wrapped in proprietary tech): is it a problem? Does it violate the spirit of openness?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- The many ways of being open, aka the OERu logic model (resources, assessment, pedagogy, credentials, etc)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Is open access good enough? Or do we need reuse / modify as well?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In general, keep the topics detailed and current. Don’t just repeat the same topics everyone repeats (why OERs are good, a case of how I used an OER in a course, etc).<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Format:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Don’t do presentations. Have an interview format. Interviewee can come prepared with slides to illustrate <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">&nbsp; Points but they should never present a sequence, only a given slide to illustrate a particular point<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Keep it conversational, back and forth. Don’t just stick to a list of questions, drill down on topics a bit<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- length: 1 hour (but structured so you can get a set of 10-15 minute videos from it)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />2. Structure of the Educause Openness Community Conversations (EOCC)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Treat it like a media production. Make the governance open, but ensure that key roles have specific people responsible for fulfillment: executive producer (liaison with organizations and funders), producer (topics and guests), director (management of audio, visual), production (management of tech), host or hosts.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In addition, open the governance to a wider membership. In particular:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- create an advisory board (to suggest topics, guests, etc.)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- create a show ‘membership’ with a discussion forum and regular exchanges with advisory board, producer and hosts<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- have an open annual general meeting<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There’s probably more stuff here I haven’t considered; I think EDUCAUSE has more experience with this aspect than I do.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />3. Best technologies to use<br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">- To created the audio/video: I personally use xSplit but any similar product would be useful. This in turn can be used with Skype or other videoconferencing systems for the interview &amp; conversation. I would output using YouTube Live, because it’s widely accessible and bandwidth scales well, and it also create a video archive of the live show. Save locally as well.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Use an HD camera and quality mic. Make sure the guests have quality mic &amp; good bandwidth (move them out of their home office to a proper studio if necessary).<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">- As mentioned before, split the local recording into 10-15 minute video segments and upload those separately to YouTube.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">- As well, livestream Audio feed using Shoutcast/Icecast at maybe 32kps for low-bandwidth and mobile phone access.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Distribute audio and video as MP3 podcasts and MP4 vodcasts &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">- ensure there is a backchannel. Don’t just use Twitter or Facebook, as many are uncomfortable. Don’t just use the YouTube channel. I create a separate channel, accessible to Twitter (ie., it aggregates Twitter comments using the hashtag) but allowing an open (anonymous, even, but I live on the edge) chat input and make it available on the video screen. See, eg. http://www.downes.ca/presentation/479<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">4. Frequency and timing:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">- Once a month is too infrequent but might work. Ideal is weekly but this would require a sustained commitment and probably financial resources. For maximum exposure the live show should be at 12:00 noon Eastern time (=8:00 am on the west coast, 5 pm in Europe, 8:30pm in India, midnight in China). If the west coast can handle it, an hour earlier, maybe two, would be even better.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />5. Interest in participation<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’d be happy to participate. Let me know.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">6. How to best call for volunteers and nominations for speakers<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Network. Get interest and participation from key agencies – UNESCO, Creative Commons, OERu, BC Campus. Don’t forget international organizations outside the U.S. – Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), Arab league Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ALESCO), Open University of China, Commonwealth of Learning, FUN (France), , etc. Especially involve people producing resources – Public Knowledge Project (PKP), Moodle, OpenDOAR, Internet Archive, Wikiedia. Don’t forget corporate learning, government learning, community colleges. Try to reach into communities outside the usual crowd – there are tons of special interest groups, schools groups, etc. Ask these agencies for both topics and potential interviewees (you will never run out of either if you cast the net widely enough).<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Market: I personally think mailing lists are the best bet. The open education community is active on a number off mailing lists, and sessions should be advertised on these. Use other EDUCAUSE lists, but reach out. Be sure to stress that people can participate in the event (backchannel, call-in, whatever). Market openings for volunteer roles as well as shows.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Social Media: it pains me to say this, but tweet (and retweets) should be encourage, Facebook posts (set up twitter Account and Facebook page). Have people blog about the show and the contents of the show.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Media: elicit media partnerships – obviously, create a link with EDUCAUSE publications. Try for a link with NPR, CBC, BBC, etc. Issue press releases announcing each show, and another following up with a key point made by the interviewee on the show. Offer the potential for magazines (Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle, THE, eLearn, etc.) to interview guests and/or run interview transcripts.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">You want to position each even as the community’s attempt to wrestle with a specific problem. The interview is just the capper of a set of lead-up events. You want to introduce the topic three weeks ahead, call for contributions to the discussion list (be sure to seed it with some posts to get discussion started; people hate an empty page). Don’t make it issue-based (ie., don’t st it up as a debate between left-right, blue-green, whatever) but as something open-ended that may have many possible solutions or approaches. Cover the discussion in other EDUCAUSE pubs. As the event nears, encourage tweets and blog posts about the topic. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">During the event, be sure it’s live tweeted (preferably with several tweeters from different perspectives). Make sure people are aware there are multiple ways to watch/participate (ask them for ideas about how to make it more open).<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the follow-up, make sure recordings and transcripts are available as soon as possible. Wrap up the event with an EDUCAUSE article, being sure to include coverage of the community participation in addition to what the guest speaker sid (and include a teaser for the next event in the coverage). <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div>https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/12/on-educause-openness-community.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-282024832917668692Mon, 20 Nov 2017 13:02:00 +00002017-11-20T08:02:36.443-05:00A Quick Definition of Neo-LiberalismIn response to <a href="http://higheredstrategy.com/what-people-mean-when-they-talk-about-neoliberal-univesities-part-1/#comment-138837">Alex Usher</a> (and in anticipation of future posts in his series):<br /><br />This is an interesting start, though I would have hoped for a more tightly bound definition at least by the end of part one. Each of the four senses of neo-liberalism that you raise can be qualified in important ways.<br /><br />- the role of markets - does not just mean the use of markets. In neo-liberalism, this means that markets are unregulated, or minimally, self-regulated. Socialist and mixed-market economies often employ regulated free markets.<br /><br />- the role of competition - even the Soviet Union engaged in competition, for example, the Olympics, hockey tournaments, and more. Public entities in Canada likewise compete for staff, for resources, and for recognition. The role of competition in neo-liberalism is that it is an existential struggle - you cannot survive (as a company, as a person) unless you succeed in competition.<br /><br />the role of performance data - not sure exactly what you're up to here, but minimally, neo-liberalism endorses the idea of "you manage only what you can measure", which rules out such things as well-being, happiness and tranquility as measures.<br /><br />the role of management - in neo-liberalism, management is focused on the bottom line, to the exclusion of all else. There is no sense of management for other outcomes, such as social good, environmental good, etc., unless some entity is willing to pay for these.<br /><br />I think it is important, if you are going to talk about the neo-liberal university, not to soft-sell neo-liberalism. It has a hard edge, and to the extent that it doesn't, it's not neo-liberalism.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AKZHAUxV39s/WhLSUyDX9II/AAAAAAAAK5U/P6ihuny6NYk08Qt97ZP3243g96tH9GIgACLcBGAs/s1600/neoliberalism20160420_630_630.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="421" data-original-width="630" height="266" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AKZHAUxV39s/WhLSUyDX9II/AAAAAAAAK5U/P6ihuny6NYk08Qt97ZP3243g96tH9GIgACLcBGAs/s400/neoliberalism20160420_630_630.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/11/a-quick-definition-of-neo-liberalism.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-2164545945407091103Fri, 17 Nov 2017 17:48:00 +00002017-11-17T12:48:56.260-05:00Four Conclusions on OERs<b>1. Access and Pedagogy</b><br /><br />Let's take it as a starting point that there are two objectives at play here:<br /><br />- first, the objective of providing <b><i>access for all</i></b>, which as I stated, was demonstrably the goal of the vast majority, if not all, people working in OER.<br /><br />- second, the objective of what David Wiley calls "<b><i>OER-enabled pedagogy</i></b>", which is the "more" he wants when&nbsp;<a href="https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/5261">he says</a>, "Stephen answers that his goal is access for all, and takes me to task for wanting more."<br /><br />So there are two (related) questions:<br /><br />- first, should the OER movement emphasize the second objective as much as (or more than, or instead of) the first?<br /><br />- second, does the OER movement as a whole actually embrace what Wiley calls "OER-enabled pedagogy"?<br /><br />Wiley pretty clearly answers "yes" to the first. Less clear is whether he thinks we should emphasize the second <i>as much</i>, <i>more than</i>, or <i>instead</i> of the first. But whatever.<br /><br />But what of the second question? Is there a unity of opinion on pedagogy in the OER movement? Should we all be embracing what Wiley calls "OER-enabled pedagogy"?<br /><br />No. First of all, people don't define OER in terms of pedagogy, they define it in terms of <i>access</i>. You can use OER for whatever pedagogy you want, good or bad.<br /><br />Second, even if OER <i>were</i>&nbsp;defined in terms of pedagogy, it's not at all clear that people would agree on Wiley's version of what that pedagogy would be. What Wiley calls OER-enabled pedagogy is <i>not</i>&nbsp;what brings together the OER movement.<br /><br />So, the answer to the second question is "no". Which means that the answer to the first question should be "no" as well.<br /><br /><i>Wiley</i>&nbsp;us free to pursue what he calls "OER-enabled pedagogy". But his efforts to link it with the entire OER movement as a whole are (to my mind) misrepresentative and damaging. To that end, he should maybe give his pedagogy a different name.<br /><br /><b>2. Faculty</b><br /><br />Who is the target audience for the OER movement? Who are we trying to convince to adopt OER? There are two possible answers:<br /><br />- faculty<br /><br />- faculty, and other people<br /><br />Wiley says, "When I use the words “adopt OER,” I mean a faculty member choosing to replace whatever appeared in the Required Materials section of their syllabus last term with OER this term."<br /><br />Wiley therefore believes the answer is the first. In this he is simply and observably wrong. It may be true that <i>in his world</i>&nbsp;faculty make all the decisions. But it's not true at all outside the university world, and not true even in all of the university world.<br /><br /><i>Wiley</i>&nbsp;is free to focus exclusively on adoption by faculty. But his efforts to constrain the entire OER movement as a whole to such a narrow approach are (to my mind) misrepresentative and damaging. He should perhaps allow the wider community to define what it means to say "adopt OER".<br /><b><br /></b><b>Interlude: Economic Epistemology</b><br /><br />Wiley says,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Almost no other part of life works this way where money is concerned. In almost every other case, the person choosing the item to be purchased is the person who has to pay for that item.&nbsp;</blockquote>This may be true in a purely capitalist economy, but most of us live in a mixed economy. For us, the person who pays and the person who chooses are often different people. Governments and institutions, not consumers, decide on our behalf everything from paving contractors to policing services to the location of hospitals.<br /><br />He says,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">This tends to encourage people to be cost conscious in their choices since they have to bear the financial consequences of their choices.&nbsp;</blockquote>Actually, the evidence to date tends to prove the opposite. For the most part, people aren't in a good position to make a choice. Often (as in the case of a student signing up for a required class) they have no choice, or limited choices based on financial means. And even when they can make a choice, they routinely make bad choices (in this they are abetted by marketers).<br /><b><br /></b><b>3. Waymaker</b><br /><br />In an argument worthy of Duns Scotus, Wiley says,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Waymaker is, in fact, our name for the way we bring many tools together cohesively, including the open source Pressbooks, Candela, and Open Assessments source code in our GitHub repo.</blockquote>So I'm <i>wrong</i>&nbsp;when I say that the code is proprietary, right? Well...<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">all code underlying Waymaker is in the public repo except the code for the analytics dashboards and messaging services, which we have not yet released as open source.</blockquote>So the way in which I am wrong is that, at some undesignated time in the future, I will be wrong.<br /><br /><b>4. Formal Educational Institutions</b><br /><br />Wiley concludes,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">most of the disagreement (and occasional confusion) between Stephen and me is my desire to work within the context of existing formal educational institutions and his desire to work outside / around them.&nbsp;</blockquote>Yes. But also that really important bit about the goal of the OER movement and the other bit about endorsing a specific pedagogy.<br /><br />But yes. I am focused on the 97%, not the 3%. Wiley might not like the way I phrased it...<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I understand from the tone of Stephen’s comment that he believes the members of this “three percent” who attend formal educational institutions to be affluent and privileged. Maybe he doesn’t know that 14% of these students have been homeless in the last 12 months and 33% of them have experienced food insecurity in the last 30 days. Yes, there is definitely work that needs doing here, and yes, I intend to continue doing it.</blockquote>This can all be true, and yet&nbsp;225 million continues to be about 3% of 7 billion. That's not political philosophy, that's math.<br /><br /><i>Wiley</i>&nbsp;is free to focus on the 3%. But his efforts to limit the entire OER movement as a whole to that demographic are (to my mind) misrepresentative and damaging.<br /><br /><b>6. Concluding Remarks</b><br /><b><br /></b>First, I think that the value that unites the OER movement is <i>access for all</i>, period and stop. Yes, individuals within the movement (including me) have additional goals. But these are different for each of us, and are over and above what we're working for in OER.<br /><br />Second, I think that the decision-makers (or, as some would say, the stakeholders) include entire educational systems, and entire societies, and that we need to understand OER in the <i>context of social policy</i>, and not merely individual faculty decision-making.<br /><br />Third, I think that many people equate 'open' with 'non-commercial' and that therefore exclusively non-commercial business models or licenses are, and ought to be treated as, <i>fully open</i>. 'Non-commercial' creates ways of limiting use, but 'commercial' creates ways of limiting access, and if we have to choose, many will choose 'non-commercial'.<br /><br />Fourth, I think that 'educational' means much <i>more than formal education</i>, and applies to many more people than merely those who work at or are enrolled in formal educational institutions, and that any understanding of 'open' must mean 'open to non-formal education' as well as to formal education.<br /><br />I am wary of efforts to deviate from these four principles, because I see them, ultimately, as efforts to undermine OER.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/11/four-conclusions-on-oers.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-119678026671424765Wed, 15 Nov 2017 21:34:00 +00002017-11-15T16:37:28.992-05:00The Real Goal of Open Educational Resources<b>1. The Goal of Open Access</b><br /><br /><a href="https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/5244">David Wiley says</a>, "The question we must each ask ourselves is – what is the real goal of our OER advocacy?" In this he's right. It's time for us to be clear about what we're working for.<br /><br />The goal of OER is <i>access for all</i>.<br /><br />This is my goal, though I don't think it's just my goal. I think it's the goal of the vast majority of those working for open educational resources (OER).<br /><br /><ul><li><a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/open-educational-resources/">UNESCO</a>&nbsp;- "UNESCO believes that universal access to high quality education is key to the building of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue."</li><li>The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (<a href="https://www.cccoer.org/about/about-cccoer/">CCCOER</a>) - "We believe that students should have equal access to high quality instructional materials in order to achieve their academic goals."</li><li><a href="https://creativecommons.org/about/program-areas/education-oer/">Creative Commons</a> - "With the internet, universal access to education is possible, but its potential is hindered by increasingly restrictive copyright laws and incompatible technologies..."</li><li><a href="https://www.oercommons.org/about">OER Commons</a> - "The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education."</li><li><a href="http://www.nolwazi.co.za/">NOLWAZI</a> - "It was always intended as an easily accessible resource for use by schools, educators and the South African community."</li><li><a href="https://sparcopen.org/open-education/">SPARC</a> - "The foundation of Open Education is Open Educational Resources (OER), which are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers."</li><li><a href="http://www.oerleb.org/">OER Lebanon</a> - "Our mission is to ensure that the benefits of open educational resources reach every school and university in Lebanon and to foster equal access to quality education through the adoption of OER."</li><li><a href="https://www.hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources/">Hewlett Foundation</a> - "Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits <i>no-cost access</i>, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions."</li><li><a href="http://advancededucation.alberta.ca/post-secondary/funding/supportslearners/open-educational-resources/">Alberta Education</a> - "By supporting the assessment, development, and use of open educational resources at post-secondary institutions, this initiative will encourage flexibility and access for all Alberta learners."</li><li><a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/open-educational-resources/why-should-i-care-about-oers/">UNESCO</a> (again) - "For students, OERs offer free access to some of the world’s best courses and even degree programs...&nbsp;For teachers, ministries of education and governments, OERs provide free and legal access to some of the world’s best courses."</li><li><a href="https://openaccess.ku.edu/oer">University of Kansas</a> - "OER is an approach to overcoming cost and reuse barriers to the benefit of students and instructors."</li><li><a href="https://www.library.ohio.edu/services/for-faculty/scholarly-communication/open-access/">Ohio University</a> - "The aim of Open Access (OA) is to disseminate scholarly research free of charge."OER ensures that students have access to all course material from the first day of class."</li><li><a href="http://www.africandl.org.za/about.htm">African Digital Library</a> - "The objective of the ADL is to develop a digital library that is available free-of-charge, to residents and institutions of Africa, for academic and business use."</li><li><a href="http://www.openaccess.lib.uct.ac.za/open-educational-resources">University of Cape Town</a> - "an OER is a teaching and learning resource created and licensed in such a way that promotes some or all of the following: free and easy retention, redistribution, reuse, revision, and remixing."</li><li><a href="https://www.ecampusontario.ca/open-education-resources/">eCampus Ontario</a> - "OER (Open Educational Resources) are free, making them accessible for learners of all socioeconomic backgrounds"</li><li><a href="https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-education">OpenSource.com</a> - "Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources, and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal."</li><li><a href="https://nclibraries.niagaracollege.ca/oer">Niagara College</a> - "Open educational resources, or OER, are items free of licence or royalty fees for reuse in an educational context."</li><li><a href="http://libguides.usc.edu/oer">USC</a> - "Education for all, no matter income level, remains an important tenet at USC. OER enables all learners to get involved in cultivating new skills, and further their career."</li><li><a href="http://oerafrica.org/about-us-2">SAIDE - OER Africa</a> - "Open Educational Resources (OER) refers to educational resources that are freely available for use by educators and learners, without the need to pay royalties or licence fees."</li><li><a href="http://guides.library.uq.edu.au/how-to-find/open-educational-resources">University of Queensland</a> - "OERs allow for: free and legal access to high quality content"</li></ul>I could continue this list indefinitely but I think the point is clear that, in addition to just me, a great many, and probably a majority, of OER advocates do so for the purpose of ensuring access for all.<br /><div><br /></div><div>This is not Wiley's objective:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Personally, my goal is not to provide less expensive access to the same teaching and learning experience to more people – access and affordability have never been my end game.&nbsp;</blockquote><div>This is probably something he could have said more clearly a bit earlier to the governments and foundations that funded his work. A lot of people who <i>are</i>&nbsp;working for access to all could have used the money.</div><div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>2. The Influence of Publishers</b></div><div><br /></div><div>David Wiley is concerned because of the publishers. He writes:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">"In the new context of inclusive access models, arguments about 'reducing the cost of college' and providing students with 'day one access' are increasingly ineffective at persuading faculty to adopt OER because publishers have completely co-opted these messages."</blockquote><div>I would suggest that faculty weren't interested in offering or using open access long before publishers changed their prices. This follows decades of work with academics in an effort to persuade them to support open access, work that led to the conclusion that academics would have to be <a href="https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1410/1410.2926.pdf">mandated</a> to use open access, or they wouldn't use it at all. And in the context of the current discussion, academics are <a href="http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/explore/open-access-survey-june2014.pdf"><i>least</i>&nbsp;likely</a> to support some model of commercial open access or access requiring the use of CC-by.</div><div><br /></div><div>So the argument based on the need for "persuading faculty" is a red herring. A majority of faculty have always been indifferent to the benefits of open access, including open educational resources, and this has been true for decades.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>And while discussing "inclusive access" policies (the program whereby students are charged for textbooks as part of their course registration and tuition costs) Wiley suggests that the work for OER advocates has been done for them by publishers:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">"If improving access and affordability are your end goal, you may be starting to feel like your work is just about finished – inclusive access models are delivering day one access and drastically lowered costs to students."</blockquote><div>First of all, as I noted in my previous post on this subject, any cost savings here are probably illusory. But even more to the point, these policies represent <i>no cost savings at all</i>&nbsp;to a person who cannot afford to pay university tuition in the first place. When OER advocates talk about "access for all" they are rarely, if ever, taking only about tuition-paying students.</div><div><br /></div><div>Access for all means access for <i>all</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>And that, again, is why the 'faculty persuasion' argument is a red herring. For those people who cannot afford access to faculty - which by my count is somewhere around 97 percent of the population (<a href="http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120216105739999">225 million</a> out of 7 billion) the decision of a faculty member one way or another is for the most part irrelevant.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Wiley says "Cost is no longer the most effective argument for adopting OER." But he has utterly no evidence to prove that. If anything, the evidence says the opposite, as I have shown.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>3. Cost and Price</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Wiley says,</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Because Pearson has the exclusive rights to distribute this title (<i>Campbell's Biology</i>), there is no competition and you’ll pay over $200 for a new copy. On the other hand, the public domain title <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> is about $8 per new paperback copy</blockquote><div>In fact, I can buy <i>Campbell's Biology</i> right now for about $CAD 97 (about $US 70) <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Campbell-Biology-10th-Jane-Reece/dp/0321775651">on Amazon</a>. It will be used, of course. 10th edition. I can <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Essential-Biology-3rd-Neil-Campbell/dp/0805368426/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1510775633&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Campbell+Biology+%283rd+Edition%29">buy the 3rd edition</a> for about $CAD 18. This brings us close to&nbsp;<i>Pride and Prejudice</i>&nbsp;territory.&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>Campbell's Biology</i>&nbsp;is still fully copyrighted (and will be until 2099).&nbsp;<i>Pride and Prejudice</i>,&nbsp;as noted, is a public domain work. These numbers strongly suggest that there is a lot more to textbook prices than licensing.</div><div><br /></div><div>Price is based on <i>willingness to pay</i>. Exclusive rights over something nobody wants is worth nothing. The publisher (in cooperation with the universities) <i>creates demand</i>&nbsp;for the work by making it a required text (and then releasing edition after edition after edition of the work to discourage used book sales).&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>But none of this matters a whole lot, except to university students.</div><div><br /></div><div>The real barrier here is the $8 cost per copy of <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>. Even at $8 per book, most people in the would cannot afford even a small fraction of the world's literature. That's why we (still) need libraries, and cost-free digital copies, and the rest of it. That's why access, over and above mere licensing, remains an issue.</div><div><br /></div><div>The price matters, and for most people in the world the price matters more than the license. A free fully-copyrighted book in the hand is worth much more than an unaffordable open-licensed book any day. Unless, of course, the <i>real benefit</i> of open licenses is that the resources <i>are</i>&nbsp;free.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>4. The Community Model</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Wiley gives two reasons for eschewing the community-based model of sustaining open educational resources.</div><div><br /></div><div>First, citing Linus Torvalds, he says, "Don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle." Of course, Torvalds is talking about software, not business models.</div><div><br /></div><div>But in this context I will repeat something I've said many times to David Wiley around the issues of business models and licensing: you can do <i>whatever you want</i>&nbsp;with your work and your content. I don't care. But <i>don't tell us what to do with ours</i>.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>This was the case for open licenses - I've been happy for people to choose whatever they want, whether it's CC-0, CC-by or CC-by-NC-SA. I choose the last, but whatever other people choose will work for me. Wiley, on the other hand, as consistently argues <i>against</i>&nbsp;CC-by-NC-SA.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>He's doing the same thing with OER business models. Here's an excerpt from his earlier post on OER:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">I’ve been shouting this from the rooftops for months now (most recently in July). And yet here we are again, with OER characterized as nothing more than a free textbook and, consequently, inclusive access held up as a reasonable alternative to OER. When we allow the false notion that OER are free textbooks to prevail, this is what we get.&nbsp;</blockquote><div>Does that read like a pro-diversity sentiment? Or does that read like somebody who is convinced that he has designed something better than everybody else?</div><div><br /></div><div>Second, Wiley is clear that he wants to focus on the three percent. "I continue to be interested in the formal learning that happens in accredited institutions that award recognized credentials," he writes.</div><div><br /></div><div>He has some good reasons for this:&nbsp;</div><div><ul><li>"Those credentials continue to be one of the best paths to achieving <a href="https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm">economic security</a> for oneself and family," and</li><li>"These students are not roaming autodidacts who, left to their own (digital) devices, will thrive and succeed as 'free range learners'."&nbsp;</li></ul><div>Fair enough. But my support for community-based <i>learning</i>&nbsp;is not the reason why I advocated community-based <i>sustainability</i>&nbsp;of open educational resources. I made clear in <a href="https://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/36781698.pdf">my OECD paper</a> that I felt that none of the other models would sustainably provide access for all.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>5. Open Pedagogy</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Wiley writes,</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Stephen is also upset that I accuse people of “‘not talking about open pedagogy’ when they take a perspective that is not based in the precious 5 Rs.” Because no one knows what ‘open pedagogy’ means, I am very careful not to use that term and I made no such accusation in my post."</blockquote>Sure, <i>now</i>. But it was a pretty constant refrain in the past.<br /><br /><ul><li>From 2013, we have his post <a href="https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975">What is Open Pedagogy</a><i>, </i>where he says "the ultimate test of whether or not a particular approach or technique can rightly be called “open pedagogy” – is it possible without the free access and 4R permissions characteristic of open educational resources?"</li><li>From last April, when he asks, <a href="https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/4943">How is Open Pedagogy Different?</a> he writes "open pedagogy is the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions."</li></ul><div>After discussion with proponents of open pedagogy, he said, "I need a completely empty phrase that I can fill with my specific meaning so that there can be no confusion about definitions when the term is used."</div><div><br /></div><div>He came up with&nbsp;<a href="https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/5009">OER-Enabled Pedagogy</a>.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>But, first, he still argues that this definition is still in play as part of open pedagogy. "For some definitions of 'open pedagogy,' OER-enabled pedagogy can be categorized as a form of open pedagogy (but not for other definitions)." </div><div><br /></div><div>But more to the point, the term OER <i>isn't completely empty</i>. People have been using it for 15 years to mean something pretty specific, and which has during all that time been associated with a particular set of benefits.</div><div><br /></div><div>He writes, "Exploring and leveraging the new ways of learning enabled by open licenses is the core of what OER-enabled pedagogy is all about." Most people would read that as meaning "exploring and leveraging the new ways of learning <i>generated though access to all.</i>" I think it's pretty clear that Wiley means something different.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>6. The Business Model</b></div><div><br /></div><div>I won't linger on this too long.</div><div><br /></div><div>Wiley argues that the books are available in the <a href="https://courses.lumenlearning.com/catalog/lumen">Lumen OER repository</a> and the software is available in the <a href="https://github.com/lumenlearning">Lumen Github site</a>. And he adds,</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">if you want Lumen staff to be responsible and accountable for running, managing, and supporting your OER-related infrastructure, yes, we charge for that&nbsp;</blockquote><div>and I have no problem with that.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>But that isn't the whole story. <a href="https://lumenlearning.com/announcements/2017-04-17/">This is from last April</a>:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Through the partnership, Follett will make Lumen Learning’s OER courseware available to institutions through Follett’s IncludED™ program and Follett Discover™ infrastructure. The seamless integration makes it easy for faculty members to find and evaluate Lumen’s OER course materials, and through the IncludED™ program, students pay low-cost Lumen course support fees ranging from $10 to $25, far less than the average cost of a commercial textbook.</blockquote><div>This <a href="http://www.downes.ca/post/66603">read to me</a> as though while it is being made to <i>look</i>&nbsp;like Lumen is charging only for running and managing an OER infrastructure, students are <i>actually</i>&nbsp;paying for the textbooks.</div><div><br /></div><div>Wiley <a href="https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/4986">explained</a>, at the time,&nbsp;</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Follett partnership is focused on two of Lumen’s offerings – Waymaker and OHM (Online Homework Manager). Both of these products wrap significant additional functionality around OER.</blockquote><div>OK, then. So I should just be able to use the Waymaker software to download and use the OER materials in the same way the students paying the $10-$25 fee are using it. Right? So, OK, over to the previously mentioned GitHub repository. Hm. Not there. Perhaps on the <a href="http://lumenlearning.com/what/waymaker/">Waymaker site</a>? Nope, no download there either. Actually, if I want to see it at all, I have to <a href="http://lumenlearning.com/demo-request/">request a demo</a>.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Lumen isn't wrapping OERs around commercial software and then getting institutions to require that students pay a fee in order to access them.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>But if you can imagine that I'm right, you can probably also imagine what my thoughts would be about the proprietor of such a model saying that we shouldn't talk cost and free access when we talk about the benefit of OER.</div></div>https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-real-goal-of-open-educational.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-5339568307029965955Tue, 14 Nov 2017 01:03:00 +00002017-11-14T13:38:42.152-05:00ConsciousnessConsciousness seems to be <a href="http://www.consciousentities.com/definitions.htm">mysterious</a> to most people. How does subjective experience arise? What is the relation between the perception of redness, say, or the thought that "Paris is the capital of France," and the purely physical mechanisms that philosopher Daniel&nbsp;Dennett believes - and I believe - constitute human processes of thought?<br /><br />Dennett addressed these problems most famously in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661">Consciousness Explained</a>. Many readers suggest that the book "might better have been titled 'Consciousness Explained Away.'" The suggestion that there is no such thing as consciousness (at least as traditionally understood) is a hallmark of a materialist philosophy, but at the same time, difficult to reconcile with our own experiences of day-to-day life.<br /><br />Most recently Dennett published a follow-up called <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Bacteria-Bach-Back-Evolution-Minds/dp/0393242072/ref=pd_cp_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=MQAE7RNW763TEZ7EWN4W">From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds</a> in which he attempts to describe how consciousness came about. The responses have been mixed, but I landed on a criticism by David Bentley Hart which takes to task not only the current work but the totality of the materialist theory of mind.<br /><br />I will not be attempting a defense of Daniel Dennett against David Bentley Hart in this post, though I certainly think that Dennett is more right than wrong. Rather, my purpose here is to use&nbsp;<a href="http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-illusionist">Hart's article criticizing Dennett</a>&nbsp;as a frame through which to offer an account of consciousness.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>My Position</i><br /><br />Let me give you <i>my answer</i>&nbsp;first, and then we'll work our way through Hart's critique, a critique which will allow me to position my response against most major objections (and let me be clear, by 'my position' and 'my response' I do not mean to claim originality or priority - these just happen to be what I believe, and almost certainly every point has a basis in previous writing).<br /><br />My position, then, is that <i>consciousness is sensation</i>, no more, no less.<br /><br />Now you might believe that there's more to consciousness than sensation, and that's one question we'll address.<br /><br />And you might wonder how sensation arises out of physical processes, and that's another question we'll address.<br /><br />But we need to begin by being clear about <i>what consciousness is</i>, because everything else will follow from that. And for that, we go back to the original statement that&nbsp;<i>consciousness is sensation</i>.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Consciousness</i><br /><br />Consciousness is distinguished, to me, by two attributes: its wholeness, and its simplicity. Let me explain each in turn.<br /><br />By 'wholeness' what I mean is that, for a person, consciousness is everything. Everything you know, everything you believe, everything you feel, everything you wish for: that's a part of consciousness. When you say 'Paris is the capital of France', that is a part of your consciousness. <i>There may be</i>&nbsp;a city called Paris out there in the world that is the capital of France, but that's beyond your consciousness.<br /><br />This is important. When I'm talking about consciousness, nothing about the city of Paris, out there in the world, constitutes a part of that consciousness. I might, perhaps, refer to a city of Paris as part of an <i>explanation</i>&nbsp;of consciousness, but that reference, and that explanation, are constituted entirely of consciousness. An explanation of consciousness is a story I tell myself about where my sensations may have come from, but that story itself remains entirely within the realm of consciousness.<br /><br />By 'simplicity' what I mean is that consciousness isn't some special property of things over and above everything else. To explain this, I'll draw an analogy, and then apply the analogy to consciousness.<br /><br />Take <i>fire</i>. We all know what fire is: we see it when we light a match or a lighter, or when we create a campfire. We see flames, we feel heat. We also know that fire occurs when a combustible material is oxidized. When <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/fire1.htm">wood burns</a>, for example, the complex hydrocarbon in wood is reduced to gases (steam, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide) and char (charcol, ashes, smoke). That's it.<br /><br />You might ask, "but where is the <i>fire</i>?" Because, after all, you see a glowing flame, a plasma, that doesn't resemble gas or ash at all. The response is, it's glowing carbon, in the form of soot. There is no 'fire' over and above the reduction of wood to gases and char via a chemical reaction. (Yes, this is very similar to Ryle's argument about <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle/#OffDocConOff">category mistakes</a>, and much of the discussion there would apply here).<br /><br />It's the same thing with consciousness.<br /><br />When a sensation occurs, our sensory neurons are stimulated. This stimulation proceeds through layers of neurons to produce what we commonly call 'perceptions', that is, our common everyday experience of colours, objects, people, and the like. Consciousness <i>is</i>&nbsp;this process. There's no 'fire' over and above the stimulation of layers of neurons.<br /><br />Now I need to be clear about this. I am not saying that the stimulation of neurons <i>causes</i>&nbsp;sensations or perceptions. This is what might be called an <i><a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/">eliminativist</a></i>&nbsp;account: consciousness <i>is</i>&nbsp;the stimulation of neurons, just as sensory experience <i>is</i>&nbsp;the stimulation of neurons. Or, more accurately: consciousness is sensation, and the existence of sensation is explained via a theory about the stimulation of neurons.<br /><br />But remember: this is an explanation. I'm not saying consciousness is really nothing more than the stimulation of neurons. I'm saying that consciousness is sensation, and that the best explanation (in science, in culture, in my experience) is that sensation is the stimulation of neurons.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Intentionality</i><br /><br />One more thing, and then we'll get to the Hart article. And that's the question of why consciousness <i>seems</i>&nbsp;mysterious.<br /><br />The problem of consciousness, really, is the problem of intentionality. That is, the problem revolves around the question of how consciousness turns out to be <i>about</i>&nbsp;something.<br /><br />Put more concretely: if everything is subjective, if everything is sensation, how do we get to the point where we're talking about <i>objects</i>&nbsp;like neurons, persons, the city of Paris, or even <i>ourselves</i>? Because, logically, if all we have is sensation, then nothing we talk about can be anything over and above sensations.<br /><br />I think there are two related responses to this concern.<br /><br />The first, I think, is an error about how thought and perception work. It is a presumption, inherited from people like Descartes, and reified by the logical positivists, that our thoughts and beliefs about objects and principles and the world at large are the result of a <i>logical inference</i>&nbsp;from sensations to beliefs. The definitive statement of this argument is probably found in A.J. Ayer's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language,_Truth,_and_Logic">Language, Truth and Logic</a>.<br /><br />We now know that there is no such inference. We can't infer from concrete experience to universal propositions (this is what Chomsky called <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Platos-problem">Plato's problem</a>). We can't generalize to laws of nature (this is the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/">problem of induction</a>). We can't even distinguish between logical statements and statements about experience (this is show in Quine's <a href="http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html">two dogmas</a>). There is no logical inference from experience to objects forthcoming, and there never will be.<br /><br />The second, I think, is that <i>we experience</i>&nbsp;our thoughts about objects and the like in the same way we experience sensations and the like: through the stimulation of layers of neurons. Not all of our thought processes are intentional (in the sense of being something that we did deliberately or through some sort of logical or constructive process). Much (maybe all) of our thought occurs naturally, through cascades of signals from one layer of neurons to the next.<br /><br />We might say, most accurately, that our experiences and beliefs about things like objects and generalizations (and language and universals) are the result of the <i>self-organization</i>&nbsp;of layers of interconnected neurons. That, to me at least, seems to be the best explanation.<br /><br />Our thoughts about objects are not <i>representations</i>&nbsp;of the external world, they are not <i>inferred</i>&nbsp;from experience, they are <i>sensations</i>&nbsp;of the external world (which J.J. Gibson would call <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF0ArkVDrT8">direct perception</a>), and are experienced directly.<br /><br />This is the theory and if you want you can stop here. The rest of this post will deal with the details as raised through argumentation offered by Hart against Dennett.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Descartes and Dualism</i><br /><br />Hart begins by describing "Dennett’s implicit admission on page 364 that no philosopher of mind before Descartes is of any consequence to his thinking." Hart argues in response that "The whole pre-modern tradition of speculation on the matter — Aristotle, Plotinus, the Schoolmen, Ficino, and so on — scarcely qualifies as prologue."<br /><br />Of course, he is right. Philosophy did not begin with Descartes. But we have to understand that it took an important turn with Descartes, and it is this turn that <i>produced</i>&nbsp;many of the problems that we are talking about today. There are different ways of describing this turn; I'll pick one that works for us, though of course we could talk about it in a lot more detail if you wanted.<br /><br />Before Descartes, pretty much all of philosophy was <i>Aristotlean</i>, that is, based on the philosophy of Aristotle. Aristotle's philosophy (and I'm eliding <i>a lot</i>&nbsp;here) is the idea of <i>the nature of things</i>, or <i>essences</i>. The idea is that there is a single <i>substance</i> (the essence of things) where individual things (or types of things) are distinguished only by contingent properties (or 'accidents') of things.<br /><br />This is similar to how we define things and categorize things today: what is the essence of a thing (ie., what makes it the same as other things of its type), and what is the accident of a thing (ie., what makes it different from other things of its type). Hence, for example, we say that "a robin is a <i>bird</i>&nbsp;(cold-blooded, lays eggs, flies) with a <i>red breast</i>."<br /><br />The big debates in pre-Cartesian philosophy revolved around questions like whether essences have independent existence, or exist only as instantiated in physical objects (this is what <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor">Ockham</a> addressed); and of the nature of spirituality as essence or accident (this is part of the <a href="http://firstcenturychristianity.net/problems-with-the-trinity/">problem of the trinity</a>, "that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all the same entity, until they aren’t").<br /><br />Descartes <i>introduces</i> <i>dualism</i>&nbsp;into the mix, the idea that there are <i>two substances</i>, the mental and the physical. Before Descartes, the problem of consciousness doesn't exist. The spiritual part of a person might be a part of the essence of a person, say, but it would not be thought of as <i>separate</i>&nbsp;from the physical instantiation of the person.<br /><br />The Cartesian approach solved a lot of problems with the pre-Cartesian approach (and <i>oh</i>, it had a lot of problems) but it introduced with it a range of new problems. It is these new problems Dennett addresses, which is why he is not concerned about the work before Descartes.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Descartes and Scepticism</i><br /><br />The <i>other</i>&nbsp;problem that Descartes introduced to the world was scepticism. Not that Descartes was the first sceptic - the ancient Greeks had <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhonism">Pyrrhonism</a> -&nbsp; but it was Descartes who created the problem of inferring from the mental realm (experience) to the physical realm (reality). That we <i>could</i>&nbsp;do it is evident, since we all acknowledge the existence of physical objects, but (according to Descartes) we need help. And thus was born the Cartesian argument for the existence of God, not understood as a '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover">prime mover</a>' or '<a href="http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/first-cause.htm">first cause</a>', but rather apprehended <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=roJCAAAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA260&amp;lpg=PA260&amp;dq=descartes+God+mark+or+maker%27s+stamp&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=adMOfkLaZs&amp;sig=nc5Hg6IZ7HOsSQ1wtlfAb4zDiBk&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwignaC34rTXAhWGy4MKHbmgAqkQ6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&amp;q=descartes%20God%20mark%20or%20maker's%20stamp&amp;f=false">directly</a> as "the mark of the Maker stamped upon his work."<br /><br />The creation of scepticism creates the <i>requirement</i>&nbsp;that we infer from the mental to the physical. This requirement was addressed first through the <a href="http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4b.htm">Cartesian method</a> (what we know today as 'analysis and synthesis'), then through <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/bacon/">inductive reasoning</a>, and finally through to the <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/intro-to-biology/science-of-biology/a/the-science-of-biology">scientific method</a> we know today. The Cartesian approach is based on <i>reason</i>&nbsp;and <i>rationality</i>&nbsp;(and so it is known as 'rationalism'), and the idea that knowledge is founded on reason persists today (as what John Ralston Saul calls <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reason-West/dp/0679748199">Voltaire's Bastards</a></i>).<br /><br />I will not for a minute dispute the historical significance - and the overall <i>utility</i>&nbsp;- of the Cartesian method. Everything we enjoy today, from central heating to feed processing to computing to space travel - is the result of the Cartesian method, the scientific method, and the application of reason to problems. Descartes, for better or worse, launched us from the position of being dependent on nature and the universe to standing astride it as its master.<br /><br />But it's <i>wrong</i>. Language, science and reason are incredibly useful constructs, but they are <i>artifacts</i>, things we created, rather than statements about the essential nature of thought, perception and humanity. We do not <i>actually</i>&nbsp;perceive, learn and know through a process of scepticism, reason and construction. And there is not, in human nature, a separate mental realm that reasons abstractly about the physical realm.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Monism and Dualism</i><br /><br />There is the question of the <i>choice</i>&nbsp;we have in the current debate. Hart expresses it this way: the mental "was soon demoted to sheer illusion, and the mind that perceived it to an emergent product of the real (which is to say, mindless) causal order." As a result, Dennett is "is content with the stark choice with which the modern picture confronts us: to adopt either a Cartesian dualism or a thoroughgoing mechanistic monism." Which is a shame, says Hart, because "both options are equally absurd."<br /><br />Basically the choice we are presented with is as follows: either the mental (or the spiritual; pick your vocabulary) is real, and we have dualism. Or only the physical is real, and we have monism. The logical positivists (and the scientists in general, including <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/governor-general-speech-julie-payette-climate-change-1.4384481">Julie Payette</a>), opted for monism (they even named their <a href="http://www.themonist.com/">flagship journal</a> after it). The non-scientists, the religious, and most of the public, retained dualism, and reconciled their philosophy with belief in a non-physical and sometimes spiritual concept of a soul or personal (or animal) spirit.<br /><br />There is a third option, of course, and it is the option that only the mental is real. Today this position is usually derided as 'idealism' or 'subjectivism' or 'solipsism'. It is the philosophy, we were taught, espoused by 'the mad bishop' <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/">George Berkeley</a>, who proposed that ordinary objects are ideas, and nothing but ideas. Berkeley (and the other empiricists Locke and Hume) were called 'sceptics'. But unlike the rationalists (and Kant, and the logical positivists) they were sceptical of the idea that the physical is separate from, and inferred by, the mental.<br /><br />We need to be clear about what Descartes did, from the perspective of the empiricists. He convinced us that there are two types of things (two types of experience or perception) such that one is real and the other is not, and that we would have to infer from the one (the mental) to the other (the physical). But where does this requirement come from? <br /><br /><i>There is no requirement to infer to the existence of objects</i>. Objects are no more or less real than our perceptions of colour, our feelings of hot or cold, our hearing of middle C, or our smelling of maple-smoked bacon. Mmmm, maple-smoked bacon. Oh, sorry, I digress.<br /><br />We might want to <i>explain how</i>&nbsp;we perceive objects. but this is no different from the task of explaining how we sense movement or touch or whatever.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Causal Closure</i><br /><br />Hart depicts Dennett as a monist (or as a materialist, more accurately) and one of his critiques of the position is what might be called causal closure. Here's what Hart means, precisely:<br /><br />"He still thinks it a solvent critique of Cartesianism to say that interactions between bodies and minds would violate the laws of physics. Apart from involving a particularly doctrinaire view of the causal closure of the physical (the positively Laplacian fantasy that all physical events constitute an inviolable continuum of purely physical causes), this argument clumsily assumes that such an interaction would constitute simply another mechanical exchange of energy in addition to material forces."<br /><br />I'm not sure what Hart means by a "solvent" critique, but it's certainly a sound critique. But we need to separate between two ideas: first, the idea that all phenomena are material phenomena, and second, the idea that all causes (and effects) are deterministic.<br /><br />The latter was <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453">called</a> by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3orIIcKD8p4">James Gleick</a> the "Laplacian fantasy": "Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of controllable measurement process; chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability" (you can read about <a href="http://www.stsci.edu/~lbradley/seminar/laplace.html">Laplace's demon</a> here).<br /><br />But let's be clear: chaos theory is <i>not</i>&nbsp;a non-materialist theory. You can have both non-determinism and materialism together, at the same time. Chaos theory stems from the idea that very small (but still physical) causes can have very large (and unpredictable) effects. The idea that materialism means determinism stems from the idea (the analogy, really) that the mind is a machine. But there's no substance to this analogy.<br /><br />But what of the first idea, what Hart calls "the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_closure">causal closure</a> of the physical?" Can there be non-physical causes, that is, causes from beyond the matter-energy continuum that is the foundation of modern physics today?<br /><br />No, and for a simple reason. If science is wrong about this, then science is wrong about everything. <i>There is no room</i>&nbsp;in contemporary science for non-physical causes or non-physical explanations of behaviour. <a href="https://www.salon.com/2015/01/25/you_dont_have_a_soul_the_real_science_that_debunks_superstitious_charlatans/">No room</a>. Yes, there are questions that remain unanswered, but this isn't one of them. The causal structure of the universe involving the various combinations of matter and energy form a single continuous understanding from the movement of mastodons to the tiniest influences of micromatter on the <a href="https://physics.info/standard/">standard model</a>. What remains <a href="https://home.cern/about/physics/standard-model">unexplained</a> - if anything - is so small it cannot be detected by the most <a href="https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider">sensitive equipment</a> in the world. It is certainly not substantial enough to create behaviour in a human without the violation of numerous natural laws of physics.<br /><br />Does this mean that there's no God, there's no soul, and there's no life after death? Well, maybe. That's what I think. But I could be wrong about that. But I do know this: if there is a God, a soul, or a life after death, they're all a part of the natural world, not the supernatural world. As&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbvDYyoAv9k">deGrasse Tyson argues</a>, science doesn't automatically contradict religion. It just contradicts the version of religion as magic.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Explanations and&nbsp;Universals</i><br /><br />It seems odd to read Hart describe Dennett's method as "essentially fabulous." He represents Dennett as though <i>he</i>&nbsp;is the one proposing some sort of supernatural explanation.<br /><br />According to Hart, "he (Dennett) constructs a grand speculative narrative, comprising a disturbing number of sheer assertions, and an even more disturbing number of missing transitions between episodes."<br /><br />Here's Hart's criticism: "Rather, however, than attempt to explain nature in terms of a “mind-like” order of rational relations, as Aristotelian tradition did, Dennett seeks to do very nearly the opposite: to reduce mind and nature alike to a computational system..."<br /><br />This raises the question of just <i>what constitutes an explanation</i>&nbsp;of mind and nature. We'll return to this, but it's important to lay some groundwork.<br /><br />Both the Platonic and the Aristotlean approach are based in the idea of universals; the difference was essentially that Plato believed they had a separate existence, and were apprehended by reason alone (this is the point of the allegory of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA">Plato's cave</a>) while Aristotle thought, as mentioned above, that they were embodied in substance. Either way, the nature of, and the behaviour of, things (language, logic, mathematics, physics) was <i>explained</i> by these universals.<br /><br />This basis for explanation carried over through the Cartesian revolution and has come to underlie modern scientific method as described by the logical positivists. The idea was that we would observe regularities in nature (perhaps through experimentation or the process of trying to solve some problem) and from this infer through a process of induction (or maybe, abduction) to a universal principle. We would then test, verify, and confirm (or, at least, fail to falsify) this principle, which after standing the test of time, was elevated to the status of scientific theory, and ultimately, law of nature.<br /><br />The problem is, it doesn't work. It fails in two regards.<br /><br />First, there's the aforementioned problem of induction. There is no principle of logic or reason that will allow an inference from concrete experience to abstract universal. This is more than just an empirical problem, but as Nelson Goodman showed (with his '<a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/goodman.html">new riddle of induction</a>') its a problem for language and logic as well.<br /><br />Second, even if we could derive a universal principle (by, say, guessing) there is no way to confirm, verify, or falsify it through experimentation of experience. This is known as the problem of confirmation, or generally, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_paradox">Hempel's problem</a>. Falsification, Karl Popper's answer to the problem of confirmation, is susceptible to <a href="http://science.martinsewell.com/falsification.html">similar criticisms</a>.<br /><br />Scientific explanations today are subject to <a href="https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/howscienceworks_12">principles of evaluation</a> that have nothing to do with the inference to or confirmation of universal principles. These principles include consistence, clarity, comprehensiveness, that is, the completeness of an explanation over a variety of phenomena, and <a href="https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/2900_Parsimony_Analysis.htm">parsimony</a> (the principle that the simplest explanation should be accepted, which is the modern equivalent to Ockham's razor).<br /><br />An explanation need not appeal, therefore, to some "order of rational relations". It need not, first, because there is no need to refer to some hierarchy of Aristotlean universals, and second, because it might not be based on "rational relations" at all.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Teleology</i><br /><br />The core of Dennett's ideas - an my own - lies in the idea of self-organization. Our perspectives are different. He is, if you will, looking from the outside, finding no evidence of an inside, while I'm looking from the inside, finding no evidence of an outside. But the mechanisms we describe are basically the same: the explanation of consciousness is that it is a physical process, the interaction of neurons with the world outside and with each other.<br /><br />The mechanisms of evolution are in many ways the same as the mechanisms of consciousness. Evolution is the result of many small things interacting with each other and with order emerging out of this chaos. It is not the result of some design, nor is it the result of some goal of objective.<br /><br />As Hart says, "Dennett seeks to do very nearly the opposite: to reduce mind and nature alike to a computational system, which emerges from 'uncomprehending competences,' as he calls them — small, particulate functions wholly unaware of the larger functions they accomplish in the aggregate."<br /><br />People, including Hart, have difficulty with this idea. Even evolution is described in terms of some sort of desired outcome or goal, with adaptations serving this or that function. The very notion of "survival of the fittest" embodies the idea that we have, not only as life forms but as <i>species</i>, the objective of survival. Maybe this is true of humans (but given our <a href="https://climate.nasa.gov/">recent behaviour</a> I doubt it) but it is certainly not true of rabbits or bacteria, no matter how prolifically they breed.<br /><br />And I think that's why Hart attributes to Dennett a kind of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/teleology">teleology</a>. "For Dennett, all evolutionary developments occur because they incorporate useful adaptations." But if this is true of Dennett (and I don't think it is) it is nonetheless incorrect. Adaptation may <i>favour</i>&nbsp;the utilitarian, but there is nothing that prohibits the development of a useless trait (such as an <a href="https://radiopaedia.org/articles/splenunculus-1">accessory spleen</a>, or <a href="https://www.livescience.com/46986-human-genome-junk-dna.html">unused genes</a>) or an unproductive idea (such as self-mutilation, or a belief in ghosts). The utility of an adaptation might <i>explain</i>, after the fact, why it was retained, but not why it developed in the first place.<br /><br />There's an important distinction here, and we need to draw it, between describing <i>the purpose</i>&nbsp;of something, and <i>explaining why</i>&nbsp;that thing happened. Explanations do not require purpose. They do not require intent. We could have evolved a sixth toe for no reason at all, and kept it for no reason at all, even if after the fact we observe that the evolved traits in species are also those traits that helped them survive.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Suddenness&nbsp;</i><br /><br />Having (illegitimately) made teleology an essential part of Dennett's thinking, Hart now depicts it as a failure. "He has no patience for talk of “spandrels” — phenotypic traits that are supposedly not adaptations but byproducts of the evolution of other traits — or of large, inexplicable, fortuitous hypertrophies (such as, say, the sudden acquisition of language) that have no specific evolutionary rationale at all."<br /><br />What Dennett disagrees with is the idea of&nbsp;<i>suddenness</i>. Self-organization, emergence and evolution are&nbsp;<i>slow</i>&nbsp;phenomena.&nbsp; We didn't suddenly come into being, consciousness didn't suddenly come into being, and nor either does an idea in our head suddenly come into being.<br /><br />As&nbsp;<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul">described here</a>, “You shouldn’t trust your intuitions,” he told the philosophers on the Rembrandt. “Conceivability or inconceivability is a life’s work—it’s not something where you just screw up your head for a second!” He feels that Darwin’s central lesson—that everything in biology is gradual; that it arrives “not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly”—is too easily swept aside by our categorical habits of mind.<br /><br />But to Hart, language was a sudden and fortuitous development that creates (if you will) a 'gap' in evolutionary history. He wants us to understand here that language is something that arose out of nothing. We'll revisit the idea of language below, but for now, it will suffice to assert that self-organization can be (and is) non-teleological, not goal-directed, and not coincidentally, non-rational.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Self-Organization and Emergence</i><br /><br />I don't think Hart represents the concept of 'emergent' properly.<br /><br />The process of self-organization (he writes) is "an algorithmic distillation and recombination of 'uncomprehending competences.'" But "even the mental and cultural worlds were, it turns out, emergent results of such competences rather than consciously designing or designed realities."<br /><br />There are two ways of talking about 'emergent results' and I think Hart picks the wrong one.<br /><br /><a href="https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/emergence">One way</a> is to think of it as an <i>outcome</i>. Take some eggs and flour and chocolate and ix them and bake them and out of this emerges a chocolate cake. Or take a bunch of biological stuff, and manipulate it, and manipulate it, and out pops a rabbit at the other end. That's the sense I think that Hart means.<br /><br /><a href="https://theconversation.com/emergence-the-remarkable-simplicity-of-complexity-30973">The other way</a> of thinking of emergent is to see it as a <i>pattern</i>. Mess around with some ingredients and eventually they take the form of something you recognize as a chocolate cake. Or evolve from one form of biological life to another to another and eventually you end up with something you recognize as a rabbit. That's what I think Dennett means.<br /><br />It's important to understand this distinction, I think, because it helps us understand the 'suddenness' of the emergence of language (or consciousness, or any of the other phenomena we are discussing). When you are manipulating a pattern of entities, order may 'suddenly' appear out of chaos, but what changed suddenly was not the pattern of entities but rather our <i>perception</i>&nbsp;of them.<br /><br />Hart presents the process as being something that should lead logically to the result. For example, if we were to suddenly emerge on Times Square in New York, our history of that should be a history of getting closer and closer to that location. If we're in Atlanta, and then suddenly emerge in new York, then something of a miracle happened, or at least, there is a gap in our story that has to be explained.<br /><br />But on the other picture, what we have is something more like Albert Einstein. What is the story of <i>his</i>&nbsp;evolution? It is not a history of his parents and grandparents getting smarter and smarter until we have one of them who emerges as Albert Einstein. No; great intelligence is just one of the possible configurations of humans, and when it appears it is recognized as such, but its emergence exists because of our recognition, not because its history was somehow leading to this.<br /><br />A 'mental world' is like Albert Einstein. It's a particularly wonderful configuration of existence that we (rightly) recognize as being something special.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Qualia</i><br /><br />We return now to the question of the two types of things defined&nbsp; by Descartes, or as I characterized them, the two kinds of perceptions. This time we approach it from the side of subjective experience, and in particular, sense perception.<br /><br />There is a notion of <a href="https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/activities/modules/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf">what it feels like</a> to perceive something. The phenomenon of pain offers a great example. When we are in pain, it hurts, but when we observe someone else in pain, no matter how closely, it does not hurt (though the activity of <a href="http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror.aspx">mirror neurons</a> may make us flinch a little). So clearly there is something different about the subjective experience of pain that is not observable as the physical experience of pain.<br /><br />These subjective experiences, as Hart tells us, are known as <i><a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/">qualia</a></i>. They are, as he tells us, "direct subjective impressions, such as color or tone." And the problem is that "There is simply no causal narrative — and probably never can be one — capable of uniting the phenomenologically discontinuous regions of 'third-person' electrochemical brain events and 'first-person' experiences, nor any imaginable science logically capable of crossing that absolute qualitative chasm."<br /><br />From where <i>I</i>&nbsp;sit, the argument here is no more amazing than the observation that I am not other people. If I were, I would feel their pain, but I'm not, so I don't. But for Hart (and many millions of others besides him) this produces an irreducible difficulty.<br /><br />Where does this difficulty arise, though? I think it lies in the supposition that my observation of someone else's experience should feel (to me) the same as my experiencing of the same type of experience for myself. But why would I suppose this?<br /><br />Let's make it <i>me</i>&nbsp;that is having the pain while I observe the process externally. We'll imagine that my eyes have been separated from my brain ("just think of it as stretching the optic nerves") though a process such as described in Dennett's <a href="https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Dennett-WhereAmI.pdf">Where Am I</a>? So, when you prod me with the red-hot iron, causing pain, I am observing my brain from the 'third person' perspective (indeed, because my eye is now detached, I can use a microscope and get as detailed a view as I want).<br /><br /><i>Now</i>&nbsp;it is going to become pretty clear that the pain that I feel and the electrochemical reaction I observe are one and the same. Every time you prod me, the neurons fire, <i>and this firing I experience as pain</i>. They are not two separate things. They are one and the same thing.<br /><br />The problem of <i>qualia</i>&nbsp;arises only because I am making inferences about the external world. It's like saying that my eye doesn't exist because I can't see my eye directly. Strictly speaking, that's true, I <i>can't</i>&nbsp;see my eye directly - I have to use a mirror or take a picture or some such thing. But my seeing of <i>anything</i>&nbsp;is my experience of the eye; my feeling of <i>anything</i>&nbsp;is my experience of neurons firing.<br /><br />The inference here is not <i>to</i>&nbsp;the qualia <i>from</i> the physical phenomenon. It's <i>from</i>&nbsp;the qualia <i>to</i>&nbsp;the physical phenomenon. And that inference, as I've argued above, isn't an inference at all; it's just the way we perceive the world.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Unity of Apprehension</i><br /><br />In what was probably the greatest feat of philosophical reasoning in history, Immanuel Kant, through what he called the '<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ESUzQHPW-M">transcendental deduction</a>', derived the existence of space and time as the "necessary conditions for the possibility of perception".<br /><br />This work appears (greatly abbreviated) in Hart as the 'unity of apprehension". He writes, "there is the irreducible unity of apprehension, without which there could be no coherent perception of anything at all...&nbsp;It is a unity that certainly cannot be reduced to some executive material faculty of the brain, as this would itself be a composite reality in need of unification,' and so on, turtles <a href="http://www.ramblemuse.com/articles/turtles.html">all the way down</a>.<br /><br />The phrase "unity of apprehension" actually originates in theology and <a href="http://divinity-adhoc.library.yale.edu/HansFreiTranscripts/Freitranscripts/Frei01-Analogy.htm">is the idea</a> that the existence of God is inconceivable; to apprehend the self is to apprehend the world is to apprehend God, all at the same time. In the present more secular sense I'll read it as the apprehension (as suggested by Kant) of space and time and a necessary part of our own existence.<br /><br />So Hart's argument here is essentially that there is nothing in the physical account of mind and consciousness that could account for our perception of the unity of space and time. "Even if we accept that the mind merely represents the world to itself under an assortment of convenient fictions, this would involve a translation of sense data into specific perceptions and meanings."<br /><br />If we <i>assume</i>&nbsp;the separation of our thoughts into separate categories of (say) <i>qualia</i>&nbsp;and <i>categories</i>&nbsp;(such as space and time) then, yes, we must attempt the impossible translation from one to the other. But if they aren't separate and distinct - if there's no difference between a perception of 'redness' and a perception of 'time', then the unity of apprehension is no big deal.<br /><br />Hume <a href="http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4t.htm">said</a> we arrive at such ideas easily and naturally, through, he said, custom and habit. We no more infer to the existence of space and time than we infer to the existence of ourselves, to pain, to the colour red. It was this line of thought that prompted Kant to undertake the transcendental deduction. But it wasn't really necessary.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Intentionality Again&nbsp;</i><br /><br />There are two senses of 'intentionality' and Hart hits both of them in a singe paragraph (sometimes they are spelled differently, a custom I will adopt here):<br /><br />First, there is <i>intensionality</i>, which is the 'aboutness' of our thoughts. The modern discussion of intensionality follows from Kant and is probably best represented in <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/husserl/">Husserl</a>'s phenomenology, which <a href="https://archive.org/stream/IdeasPartI/Husserl-IdeasI#page/n132/mode/1up">distinguishes</a> between the <i>meaning</i>&nbsp;(or sense) of a word, as distinct from its reference, or its relation to states of affairs in the external world.<br /><br />Second, there is <i>intentionality</i>, which is understood in the common sense of our '<a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=aEGVDAAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA171&amp;lpg=PA171&amp;dq=intending&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=LFT8TUZwFy&amp;sig=WcK8u9bDobov-0_HnQZAHB_yU9w&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjBoNPexrfXAhVk5oMKHX5UAa84HhDoAQg6MAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=intending&amp;f=false">intending</a>' to do something. In philosophy, and in particular in the context of the problem of consciousness, it has to do with the idea of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCGtkDzELAI">free will versus determinism</a>. If consciousness is purely physical, how can someone <i>intend</i>&nbsp;to do something? We could include in this category other mental phenomena such as 'wanting' and 'desiring'.<br /><br />As I said, Hart brings both into the discussion: "This problem, moreover, points toward the far more capacious and crucial one of mental intentionality as such — the mind’s pure directedness (such that its thoughts are about things), its interpretation of sense experience under determinate aspects and meanings, its movement toward particular ends, its power to act according to rationales that would appear nowhere within any inventory of antecedent physical causes."<br /><br />All of these focus on the relation between ourselves and the 'other'. We see reflections of this problem throughout phenomenological and existentialist philosophy - <i><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/I-Thou-Martin-Buber/dp/1578989973">I and Thou</a></i>&nbsp;(Buber), <i><a href="http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Heidegger,Martin/Heidegger,%20Martin%20-%20Being%20and%20Time/Being%20and%20Time.pdf">Being and Time</a></i><a href="http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Heidegger,Martin/Heidegger,%20Martin%20-%20Being%20and%20Time/Being%20and%20Time.pdf">&nbsp;</a>(Heidegger), <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10033.Being_and_Nothingness">Being and Nothingness</a></i>&nbsp;(Sartre). The relation of the self to the other is also frequently reified as the <i>will</i>, and in for example <i><a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Representation">The World as Will and Representation</a></i> (Schopenhauer) and <i><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Will-Power-Friedrich-Nietzsche/dp/0394704371">The Will to Power</a></i>&nbsp;(Nietzsche).<br /><br />So the problem raised here by Hart has as much to do with the nature of our conception of <i>self</i>&nbsp;as it does with the nature of how our thoughts come to be about something or to express intentions and desires.<br /><br /><a href="http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/percep/DescartesMeditations.pdf">Descartes</a> <i>begins</i>&nbsp;with the self. <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzaKqVGec_Q">Cogito ergo sum</a></i>. "I think, therefore, I am. What am I? A thing that thinks."<br /><br />How does he know this? He doesn't. <i>He made it up!</i>&nbsp;He has created out of nothing a second substance, a <i>thinking</i>&nbsp;substance<i>, </i>that will think about things, that will intend things and want things, and more. But what if there is only (if you will) <i>one</i>&nbsp;substance in human nature? What if what we are, really, is a <i>thing that feels</i>&nbsp;or a <i>thing that senses</i>?<br /><br />Now, instead of a mystery, we have a story.<br /><br />Why do we talk about objects? Because we perceive them as such. Our experiences include not just sense-data or <i>qualia</i>, as described above, but also phenomena such as <a href="http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/2017/10/working-memory-and-object-permanence.html">space and time</a>, <a href="http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/LOCAL_COPIES/GOMES1/marr.html">multi-dimensional objects</a>, and more. We have the five canonical senses, but also senses of balance, of heaviness or weight, feelings, emotions, sentiments, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Natural-History-Senses-Diane-Ackerman/dp/0679735666">and more</a>.<br /><br />And we have senses that are not only outwardly directed (so to speak) but also inwardly directed. We have (as Hume argued) senses of taste, of pleasure and disgust, anger and fear, happiness and pain, even abstracts such as justice and fairness. We often regard these as types of opinion - "a matter of taste" - but from the perspective of the person having the sensation (that is, you and I!) there's nothing opinionated about it. If something feels disgusting to me, it just <i>is</i>&nbsp;disgusting; the best I can accept is that some other people find it less so.<br /><br />So what, then, are intentions, desires and needs, other than sensations? These are feelings, directly apprehended, no less so that the redness of an apple of the lusciousness of the moon.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>The Senses</i><br /><br />In this section I offer an explanation of how we have the senses we do. In addition to the <i>caveats</i> about explanations that I addressed above, I want to caution as well that this section is somewhat speculative, and that the results of actual human physiology research may differ somewhat in the details.<br /><br />That said, here's the story: the human brain is composed of layers of connected neurons. The top layer (or outermost layer) is the sensory layer. Here neurons are stimulated by phenomena in the external world. This layer is where we find the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10885/figure/A740/?report=objectonly">surface layer of the retina</a>, the <a href="http://www.biology-pages.info/O/Olfaction.html">oderant receptors</a>, <a href="http://www.neurophys.wisc.edu/auditory/johc.html">hair cells</a> in the inner ear, and so on.<br /><br />We have sensory neurons throughout the body in the form of nerve cells. Some of these detect interactions on the surface of the skin, while others detect what happens inside the body - in the stomach, in the chest, and so on.<br /><br />These neurons are densely interconnected with the next layer of neurons, and the next, and so on. In the visual cortex, for example, there are six layers of neurons connected to input from the multiple layers of the retina. And these are thence connected to even more inner layers of neurons.<br /><br />Conscious experience <i>is</i>&nbsp;the firing of these inner layers of neurons.<br /><br />A single neuron in this inner layer may correspond to a pattern of neurons on the retina. Or it may correspond to a collection neurons in the eye, ear and mouth. What we sense may be described as a colour, a taste, an object, a period of time. The main point here is that there is no <i>inference</i>&nbsp;taking place here. There is nothing more or less than the activations of interconnected neurons.<br /><br />Now here's where it gets fun. Beyond these inner layers there are <i>more</i>&nbsp;inner layers, and these neurons are also activated. But these layers are so abstract that their activation doesn't correspond to any coherent description of the senses. It might be (and indeed is likely) that we do not sense these activations at all. But deeper and deeper the layers go, with interactions and activations constantly happening as a result of the original sensory interaction.<br /><br />At a certain point, we reach the last layer, but the activations don't stop. Instead, they begin to migrate <i>back</i>&nbsp;through the layers of neurons. Now the deep abstract activations begin to interact with the inner layers. Our perceptions are informed not only by the input of the senses going in one direction, but also by the backward-propagation of activations going in the other direction.<br /><br />We don't just sense what we see, feel, touch, etc.; our sensations might arise out of interactions among neurons anywhere in the brain. We have sensations that don't correspond to any coherent sensory input. We see things. We hear voices in our head. Sometimes we have hallucinations. Sometimes we dream. All of these are different types of ways the neurons in those inner layers can be activated.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-n1cgRWpiztE/WgsftRKLLGI/AAAAAAAAK3M/Ue48iEVu78MbbGovfys61LJGjC-Bs6VMwCLcBGAs/s1600/asleep-awake.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="905" data-original-width="1600" height="181" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-n1cgRWpiztE/WgsftRKLLGI/AAAAAAAAK3M/Ue48iEVu78MbbGovfys61LJGjC-Bs6VMwCLcBGAs/s320/asleep-awake.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from Anil Seth, The Neuroscience of Consciousness,<br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI</td></tr></tbody></table>What's interesting is that, in the study of neural activation in conscious states, the more <a href="https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI?t=18m23s">complex</a> the interaction, the more conscious the person. Consciousness <a href="https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI?t=10m29s">isn't simply an on-off</a>. We can be unconscious, partially conscious (as in REM sleep), fully conscious, or even hyper-conscious (as when <a href="https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI?t=16m17s">on certain drugs</a> such as LSD).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ak21eZWzBwo/WgeJ5EV1siI/AAAAAAAAK2A/nVf1z72N-EgVCjDOkRLwM993SNd70S6hQCLcBGAs/s1600/consciousness.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="836" data-original-width="1074" height="249" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ak21eZWzBwo/WgeJ5EV1siI/AAAAAAAAK2A/nVf1z72N-EgVCjDOkRLwM993SNd70S6hQCLcBGAs/s320/consciousness.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>Now this is a very abstract representation of something that is much more complex. There are many more layers. There is not just one single set of layers; the structure of the brain is <i><a href="http://willcov.com/bio-consciousness/review/Modularity%20of%20Brain.htm">modular</a></i>. There are different types of senses in different parts of the brain (the famous '<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAoFPIHBu6U">lizard brain</a>' for example).<br /><br />And even more importantly, the blue dots (the neurons that are not part of our consciousness) are outside our experience. Everything we know, everything we are, everything we do, our entire mental life - all of that takes place in the red neurons, the activation of which <i>is</i>&nbsp;conscious experience. which of our neuron is a red neuron and which is a blue is a matter of empirical discovery, and even more, is probably different for every person. What we feel - what we sense - seems to <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/synesthesia">vary a lot</a> from person to person.<br /><i><br /></i>Why would the brain feed us sensory images that are 'not real' (that is, not caused directly by external sensations)?&nbsp;<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermann-helmholtz/">Hermann von Helmholtz</a> suggested that the brain is a <a href="http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:521922:10/component/escidoc:539546/vanberkum-iljpap2010-definitive.pdf">prediction</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/brain-prediction-machine-jack-raese-md/">machine</a>. As Raese writes, "What we perceive is a combination of top down knowledge based prediction and bottom up incoming sensory evidence (signals from sensory receptors)." This is what we would <a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6097597/">expect</a> of a neural network. This is known as the <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bayesian-brain">Baysean brain</a>.<br /><br />--- <i>Rationality</i><br /><i><br /></i>We return to Hart, who after raising the issues of <i>qualia, </i>unity of apprehension, and intentionality, next turns to rationality. "There is the problem of the semantic and syntactic structure of rational thought, whose logically determined sequences seem impossible to reconcile with any supposed sufficiency of the continuous stream of physical causes occurring in the brain."<br /><br />There are different ways to state this problem, but probably the most straightforward is to assert that the laws (or rules or principles) in the (objective) world are not the same as (and logically independent of) the laws (or rules or principles) of the mind. Thus, for example, if we think of a giraffe, the giraffe in our thoughts will not be subject to (say) gravity the way a real giraffe is. Meanwhile, we can think of things that do not exist in nature, such as the square root of -1.<br /><br />The supposition that mental states (or representations) are governed by the same principles as physical states is what <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c925/289e88cb8fc9175ff9614a4e28f57e2a28a1.pdf">Pylyshyn calls</a> 'the objective pull',&nbsp; "the tendency to view the cognitive process in terms of properties of the represented objects (i.e., the semantics of the representation) instead of the structure of the representation itself (i.e., the syntax of the representation)." A case in point would be <i>mental images</i>, which may behave differently from the objects in the world they represent.<br /><br />Pylyshyn thinks of the objective pull as a fallacy, and anyone who has ever thought of a pink elephant knows that there is an important sense in which Pylyshyn is right. We can have thoughts that obey nothing but the laws of logic, and ignore the laws of the real world.<br /><br />But the fallacy of the objective pull counts as evidence for irreducible mental states governed by laws of language and logic only if we think that our thoughts are representational states. But what if they're not representational states?&nbsp;Our thoughts of objects could well be simply that: thoughts of objects. They are perceived directly; they are <i>sensations</i>, not representations. So they behave how they behave, and it's when we try to make sense of <i>that</i> that we tell stories about the objective properties of objects..<br /><br />But what of language, logic and mathematics themselves? These are pure abstractions. It's not possible to sense a pure abstraction; it is by definition something with no sensory properties whatsoever.<br /><br />I will grant Hart and the other proponent of a 'mental substance' this: if we can't tell a (plausible) story about mathematics, logic and language in the terms of this discussion thus far, then we will have to grant that they may have a point. But I don't think we'll ever get to that point. Non-rationalist accounts of logic, language and mathematics abound.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Abstractions</i><br /><i><br /></i>The difference between the principles of language, logic and mathematics on the one hand and our sensory experiences on the other hand is that the former require the use and comprehension of abstractions such as necessity, negation and universals, while the latter are concrete and contingent facts.<br /><br />Hart raises this difference as follows: "there is the issue of <i>abstraction</i>, and its necessary priority over sense experience," and "primordial and irreducible concepts of <i>causality</i> and of <i>discrete forms</i> are required for any understanding," and "some concept of <i>resemblance</i> must already be in place," and "the bare concepts of Euclidean <i>geometry</i>," and finally (but not finally), "orientations of the mind, such as goodness or truth or beauty in the abstract."<br /><br />The best (and only) response is to deny that these principles have the characteristics Hart says they have, and/or to deny that we must prove we derive them in the sense that Hart says we do.<br /><br />First, none of these concepts is necessarily prior to experience (known in philosophy as '<i>a priori</i>') despite being represented as such from Plato on down. What this means, specifically, is that none of these concepts is either <i>necessary</i>&nbsp;nor <i>universal </i>(another way of saying the same thing is to say that 'necessity' and 'universality' are useful fictions we create for ourselves). So it's sufficient to say that we perceive <i>instances</i>&nbsp;of the concepts in question.<br /><br />And, clearly, we do perceive instances of these. We see an instance of abstraction any time we use a <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/">rock to stand for a sheep</a>. Causality, as Hume observed, can be seen in a simple <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sUm0Ox5N80">game of billiards</a>. The concept of resemblance would occur to us on seeing our first <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl_eNu4NUVI">set of twins</a>. Geometry can be as clear to us as <a href="https://naturalmath.com/2013/06/geometry-in-the-sand/">lines in the sand</a>. And goodness and truth can be (and, I would argue, <i>are</i>) <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-sentimentalism/">sentiments</a> or emotions, in other words, directly apprehended as perceptions.<br /><br />The reason for supposing that these cannot be derived from experience is that it is not possible to deduce (or even induce) such concepts of necessity and universality from concrete experience. And while on the one hand I deny that these concepts <i>are</i>&nbsp;necessary or universal, it is still required to show how we might come to think that they are. After all, the concepts of necessity and universality seem&nbsp;<i>themselves</i>&nbsp;to be beyond our experience.<br /><br />I think that the answer lies in properly understanding how we create abstractions in the first place. The usual way of doing it is to extrapolate from concrete experience: this duck is white, that duck is white, those ducks are white, ergo (after a lot of ducks) all ducks are white.<br /><br />But that's not how we get abstraction. We get abstraction through a process of <i>subtraction</i>. At any given point in time, our senses detect millions of things. But by feeding activation through layers of neurons, we've get this down to something manageable: a white object with orange beak over here, a white object with beak over there, and so on. Subtract a property ('over here', 'over there') and we get an abstraction ('a white object with orange beak'). Keep subtracting and you get all the abstraction you need to make rationality work.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Absolute Qualitative Difference</i><br /><br />Hart accuses Dennett of what he calls the&nbsp;“pleonastic fallacy”, which he describes as "the attempt to explain away an absolute qualitative difference — such as that between third-person physical events and first-person consciousness — by positing an indefinite number of minute quantitative steps, genetic or structural, supposedly sufficient to span the interval."<br /><br />It's a bit like walking from India to China, I suppose. No matter how long the journey, no matter how many steps were taken, at some point you just have crossed over the border, and it is <i>that</i>&nbsp;step that we need to look at; all the other steps are merely window dressing. This again is a concept from <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/10/the-lively-god-of-robert-jenson">theology</a>, and in particular, the brand of theology that says there is an absolute qualitative difference between, say, the ordinary and the divine.<br /><br />And this, he argues, is what the story of evolution fails to tell. "Somewhere in the depths of phylogenic history something happened, and somewhere in the depths of our neurological machinery something happens, and both those somethings have accomplished within us an inversion of brute, mindless, physical causality into, at the very least, the appearance of unified intentional consciousness."<br /><br />The first thought would be to suggest that there <i>isn't</i>&nbsp;an absolute qualitative difference between being a thing that is conscious and being a thing that is not conscious. But that move has been tried and has failed, he argues:<br /><br />- There's <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/supermin/">supervenience</a>, a kind of epiphenomenalism, that asserts that a mental state is something such that no change occurs in a mental state without a corresponding change in an associated physical state.<br /><br />- there's <a href="http://www.colinmcginn.net/mysterianism-revisited/#.WgeeCWiPJPY">mysterianism</a>, which is the assertion that some things about nature yet remain a mystery<br /><br />- there's <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#VariContPanp">panpsychism</a>, which suggests that&nbsp;conscious experience and thought are fundamental and ubiquitous<br /><br />- there are <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/">quantum theories</a> which suggest that things like logic (and thought and free will) are quantum phenomena<br /><br />Hart is right. None of these is convincing. The most plausible theory of all, which he depicts Dennett as endorsing, is <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/">eliminative materialism</a>. Famously endorsed by <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/matter-and-consciousness">Paul Churchland</a>, this theory (to quote the SEP) "<span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: serif; font-size: 16.5px;">is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist."</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: serif; font-size: 16.5px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: serif; font-size: 16.5px;">The assertion that&nbsp;</span><i>consciousness is sensation</i>&nbsp;could count as an type of eliminative materialism, if we agree that arguing that there are no&nbsp;<i>mental</i>&nbsp;states, only sensory states, is eliminative. Call it 'eliminative phenomenalism', maybe.<br /><br />But more to the point, what are we to make of the “pleonastic fallacy”? Well, it depends on the <i>a priori</i>&nbsp;assertion that there <i>are</i>&nbsp;two quantatively different states that cannot be crossed from one into the other without crossing a boundary. But there are <i>many</i>&nbsp;types of different states where no boundary is crossed at all.<br /><br />For example, suppose our intrepid hiker was walking from south Asia to north Asia. At what point did he stop being in the south and start being in the north? There's no definitive point where this happened. The requirement here, to make a charge of&nbsp; “pleonastic fallacy” stick, is to <i>prove</i>&nbsp;that there is a boundary, and not just a difference in degree. But why can't I say that rocks have no consciousness, that humans have full consciousness, and that various things (plants, animals) have varying degrees of consciousness in between?<br /><br />If consciousness is sensation, it's not difficult to say that at all. Each degree, and each type, of consciousness will be the different types and degrees of sensations had by the various entities, from rocks (none) to plants (minimal) to animals (fuller) to us (fulsome). There's no difference in <i>kind</i>&nbsp;here, though we might <i>recognize</i>&nbsp;some as conscious and some not.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Evolution</i><br /><i><br /></i>History records the development of life from the original inanimate raw materials to the first single celled organisms to plants and then lizards and then people. Somewhere along the line, consciousness emerged.<br /><br />Hart is unhappy with this explanation. "Dennett is an orthodox neo-Darwinian," he writes, "in the most gradualist of the sects. Everything in nature must for him be the result of a vast sequence of tiny steps." This, however, makes his task more difficult. "The burden of any narrative of emergence framed in those terms is that the stochastic logic of the tale must be guarded with untiring vigilance against any intrusion by 'higher causes'," which may be an impossible task where consciousness is concerned.<br /><br />The difficulty, as Hart sees it, is that there are stages along the sequence where "competencies" suddenly emerge, competencies indicative of consciousness, but which do not appear to have developed out of any evolutionary process.<br /><br />We looked at this argument in a preliminary fashion above, in the discussion of the two senses of emergence. In what follows, we'll see the distinction applied.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Language</i><br /><br />Humans speak - and think - in language. This might be one of the more remarkable stages of evolution. It is certainly one that distinguishes humans from rocks, plants and lizards. And according to Hart (and no few rationalists generally) it is a place where Dennett's account fails.<br /><br />Hart argues (as noted above) that Dennett is a gradualist, which means he does not recognize such evolutionary short cuts such as an innate capacity for language (as <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00401/full">proposed</a> by Chomsky). From my perspective, Chomsky <i>needs</i>&nbsp;a short cut, because he supposes that human language embodies (at least in part) a universal grammar, which as we've seen above is not going to be derived from experience.<br /><br />"For Dennett, language must have arisen out of social practices of communication, rooted in basic animal gestures and sounds in an initially accidental association with features of the environment. Only afterward could these elements have become words, spreading and combining and developing into complex structures of reference."<br /><br />Nor does Dennett recognize "the vital evolutionary saltation between pre-linguistic and linguistic abilities to a single mutation" such as "the elementary computational function called 'Merge,' which supposedly all at once allowed for the syntactic combination of two distinct elements, such as a noun and a verb."<br /><br />Either of these is the India-China version of language acquisition, a story where at one point we didn't have a capacity to use language, and then the next, we did. There is, as I suggested above, no reason to believe language-acquisition (or consciousness generally) developed that way.<br /><br /><br />---&nbsp;<i>Grammatical Constraints and Powers</i><br /><br />As noted above, Dennett's depiction of the development of language is gradualist. As Hart describes Dennett's position, "Language must have arisen out of social practices of communication, rooted in basic animal gestures and sounds...&nbsp;&nbsp;Only afterward could these elements have become words, spreading and combining and developing into complex structures of reference... 'proto-languages' that have since died away."<br /><br />Not so, according to Hart. "There is no trace in nature even of primitive languages, let alone proto-languages; all languages possess a full hierarchy of grammatical constraints and powers." Nor is it possible for language to have developed out of proto-language. "It is logically impossible even to reverse-engineer anything that would qualify as a proto-language. Every attempt to do so will turn out secretly to rely on the syntactic and semiotic functions of fully developed human language."<br /><br />But wait a minute. Just what is "a full hierarchy of grammatical constraints and powers?" How is it that language has them? From where I sit, the error is not in gradualism, it is in the description of&nbsp;<i>language&nbsp;</i>(this is why&nbsp;<a href="http://digital2.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735061817932/manuscript/pages">Wittgenstein</a>&nbsp;is so important).<br /><br />Language, mathematics and logic have long been assumed to be special cases of cognition. I've alluded to some of of these special attributes above: necessity and universality. Language also provides the basis for reference and representation. It couldn't be any more unlike sensory experience. These are the "grammatical constraints and powers" Hart refers to.<br /><br />There is almost no end to the list. For example, Hart talks of "what linguists <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_(linguistics)">call</a> 'structural proximity' and 'linear proximity'." Take, for example, the sentence "Whose cake have you been eating?" The words 'cake' and 'eating' are not <i>structurally</i>&nbsp;proximate - they are not beside each other in space or time. But they are <i>semantically</i>&nbsp;proximate: what we are talking <i>about</i>&nbsp;in this sentence is 'cake eating'. According to Hart, "Without such a disjunction, nothing resembling linguistic practice is possible; yet that disjunction can itself exist nowhere except in language." Both types of proximity, however, are <i>observational</i>&nbsp;proximities. The association between 'cake' and 'eating' is a natural outcome of a neural network that has analyzed a large body of expressions (this is something you can test for yourself).<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wd8PQuGuMao/WgnuVhCT6wI/AAAAAAAAK2Y/JsCp0gC9xRAKoOHf2ecYuuEVCHL2tqoBQCLcBGAs/s1600/eating%2Bcake.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="449" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wd8PQuGuMao/WgnuVhCT6wI/AAAAAAAAK2Y/JsCp0gC9xRAKoOHf2ecYuuEVCHL2tqoBQCLcBGAs/s320/eating%2Bcake.JPG" width="290" /></a></div>What <i>would </i>be a surprise would be to find some element of language that cannot be reproduced in neural networks. After all, <i>language is learned by neural networks</i>. The argument that there is some mystical non-natural aspect to languages is rapidly being proven false in the domain of <a href="https://blog.algorithmia.com/introduction-natural-language-processing-nlp/">natural language processing</a> today.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Semantics, Again</i><br /><i><br /></i>Semantics is a hoary beast in language that won't go away. We have considered it above several times under the heading of 'intentionality'. Ultimately, semantics has to do with what we call the 'aboutness' of a word, sentence or sequence of sentences. The problem of semantics is that the 'aboutness' of something from the inner or mental state seems to require, or at the very least, presuppose, an outer or external state.<br /><br />That's why the reduction of language to its constituent sounds and shapes seems so inadequate. The semantical elements seem seem to be in some sense 'over and above' the sound and the shapes. That's why Hart writes, "The repeated sound of a given word somehow embeds itself in the brain and creates an 'anchor' that functions as a 'collection point' for syntactic and semantic meanings to 'develop around the sound.'" And this creates something that is ineliminable. "The only possible organizing principle for such meanings would be that very innate grammar that Dennett denies exists — and this would seem to require distinctly mental concepts."<br /><br />The diagram above will suggest my response to this assertion. <i>Semantics is association</i>. It is the association between the sounds and shapes with each other and with the other sensory phenomena that occur in our day to day experience. There is no 'standing for' or 'representation' over and above simple association. This gets back to the wholeness and simplicity I referred to above. If you want an <i>explanation</i>&nbsp;for the association that takes place, it can be found in the interactions in the neural network that constitutes our brain. But the <i>description</i>&nbsp;of semantics consists of nothing over and above association.<br /><br />But what about the relation where one thing can 'stand for' the other? There is nothing mysterious about that relation, and we need no special powers to depict the relation. It appears in our own experiences with as much regularity as the similar 'stand on' relation. We can use a chair to stand for something; we can use a chair to stand on.<br /><br />And, in general, we experience words the same way we experience chairs. They are physical symbols and audio sounds that often go together. These images and sounds are associated with other experiences that happen at the same time, though as we experience them over and over the association with other things becomes more and more abstract, Again, it doesn't make sense to say that a these images and sounds 'stand for' anything. And each person associates them with different experiences over time.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Conventions and Physicality</i><br /><br />Consider, again, precisely how Hart describes language and semantics. "All semantic information consists in the interpretation of signs, and of conventions of meaning in which signs and references are formally separable from one another, and semiotic relations are susceptible of combination with other contexts of meaning."<br /><br />A <i>convention</i>&nbsp;is not an inner mental phenomenon. It is a thing in the world, just like companies, high income brackets, and jet-skis. A <a href="http://www.liberatemedia.com/thoughts-social-conventions-comparisons-recommendations-offline/">convention</a> is something a lot of people do such that, if you asked someone, they would say that this is something you <i>should</i>&nbsp;do. Meanings, signs and references are <i>things people do</i>. The 'language' aspect of language is an <i>external</i>&nbsp;phenomenon, a thing in the world, that we have to <i>learn about</i>&nbsp;just as we have to learn about physics and geography.<br /><br />It is important here to keep in mind that I am not proposing some sort of <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/">operationalism</a> - I am not saying that mental entities stand for measurements or operations such as counting sheep or assessing profits. What I am saying is that a language, properly so-called, is something that exists in the natural world along with other things, and that the properties of a language do not automatically (or at <i>all</i>) become properties or our consciousness.<br /><br />This assertion is the core of Wittgenstein's <a href="https://1000wordphilosophy.wordpress.com/2014/07/14/wittgensteins-private-language-argument/">private language argument</a>. There is no property of a word (or sound, or shape) that is inherently the 'meaning' of that word (or sound, or shape). When we have an experience of the word 'porcupine' it does not automatically carry with it any sort of reference or intent. These (insofar as they exist at all) are the result of the way the word is <i>used</i>&nbsp;by a population of speakers. <a href="https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/meaning-is-use-wittgenstein-on-the-limits-of-language/">Meaning is use</a>.<br /><br />The same thing with signs. Hart writes, "Signs are intentional realities, dependent upon concepts, all the way down. And between mere accidental associations and intentional signs there is a discontinuity that no gradualist — no pleonastic — narrative can span." A sign is a part of the natural world. <i>Everything</i>&nbsp;leaves signs (or traces, or tracks, or indications, or whatever). It takes no feat of the imagination to picture an ancient hunter spotting a broken twig and associating it with his prey.<br /><br />Was there a point in ancient history where the first recorded instance of using something to stand for something else happened? The first <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/cave-painting">cave painting</a>, say, or the first <a href="http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/inuksuk-inukshuk/">inukshuk</a>? Sure, just as there was a first war, a first city and a first cooperative bank. But it doesn't follow that these practices had to <i>originate</i>&nbsp;in the mind. A lot of things <i>just happen</i>&nbsp;when a group of people interacts and organizes itself. It is only recognized <i>after the fact</i>&nbsp;that this is what we have done.<br /><br />A sign is an association, not a representation. It is something that leads us to think of something else. This is an association we have learned over time and which is now a part of our own experience. When we look at a rock and think to ourselves "Kareem Abdul-Jabbar" is is something we <i>feel</i>, not something that we reason about.<br /><br />The importance of this cannot be overstated. While we typically talk of semantics in terms of reference and representation, the domain of semantics extends well beyond these. It includes <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/">truth</a>, <a href="http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Value,_Philosophical_theories_of">values</a>, <a href="http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/objective.html">objectives</a>, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/">meaning</a>, <a href="https://philosophynow.org/issues/24/Meaning_and_Purpose">purpose</a>, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/">belief</a>, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/">knowledge</a>, and more. The statement that I am making here is that these are <i>all</i>&nbsp;things that we <i>feel</i>.<br /><br />That's why we have differences of opinion about them. We say that something is true when we feel that something is truth, and this feeling may originate from any of a million antecedent experiences, none of which will be shared by anyone else. Then begins the effort to develop a social convention around whether or not this or that should be called 'true' - but it takes a very significant experience for this effort to change what <i>you</i>&nbsp;feel is true.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Memes</i><br /><i><br /></i>Hart throws in an aside about memes at this point. A '<a href="https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-a-meme-2483702">meme</a>' is "a virally-transmitted cultural symbol or social idea." A meme can be thought of as something non-physical, but in no case has it transmitted non-physically. Today the internet is the primary means of propagation. "A link to a YouTube <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ">video of Rick Astley</a>, a file attachment with a Stars Wars Kid movie, an email signature with a Chuck Norris quote... these are a few examples of modern meme symbols and culture spreading through online media."<br /><br />The idea of the meme was popularized by Richard Dawkins. It's a nice way of reframing our way of thinking about identity. We usually think of interaction (and intercourse) as a means of reproducing <i>ourselves</i>, to produce little versions of ourselves, known as children. But intercourse could be equally well thought of as the way a gene reproduces <i>it</i>&nbsp;self - this is the idea Dawkins explores in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61535.The_Selfish_Gene">The Selfish Gene</a>. But if we think of a gene as an expression of an <i>idea</i>, well then, we have the idea of an idea reproducing itself, and thus the concept of meme was born.<br /><br />The internet meme is a faithful representation of that concept, <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes">says Dawkins</a>. "The meaning is not that far away from the original. It's anything that goes viral. In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use the metaphor of a virus. So when anybody talks about something going viral on the internet, that is exactly what a meme is."<br /><br />Hart dislikes the use of the virus analogy to depict the spreading of ideas. "When Dennett claims that words are 'memes' that reproduce like a 'virus,' he is speaking pure gibberish. Words reproduce, within minds and between persons, by being intentionally adopted and employed...&nbsp;depressingly substantial part of Dennett’s argument requires not only that memes be accorded the status of real objects, but that they also be regarded as concrete causal forces in the neurology of the brain, whose power of ceaseless combination creates most of the mind’s higher functions. And this is almost poignantly absurd."<br /><br />There's a large body of thought that views not just ideas but other content such as 'concepts' and 'information' as irreducibly and necessarily non-physical. In truth, there is nothing more mysterious about ideas, concepts and information than there is about categories (and, arguably, ideas, concepts and information are no more than the modern instantiation of categories).<br /><br />The meme doesn't exist at all unless it is <i>sensed</i>&nbsp;as a meme (that's why there are always some people with blank faces when you repeat the phrase "<a href="http://cheezburger.com/875511040/original-cat-meme-that-started-cheezburger">I can has cheezburger?</a>"). It we can say that it is 'sensed as a meme' only if it elicits related experiences. The idea of a meme is that it relates sometimes surprising combinations of experiences through a non-traditionally linguistic expression (if you want more, I discuss this phenomenon in <a href="http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/694">Hacking Memes</a> and <a href="http://www.downes.ca/presentation/233">Speaking in LOLcats</a>).<br /><br />Hart attributes to memes some sort of immaculate conception. "What could memes be other than mental conventions, meanings subsisting in semiotic practices? As such, their intricate interweaving would not be the source, but rather the product, of the mental faculties they inhabit; they could possess only such complexity as the already present intentional powers of the mind could impose upon them."<br /><br />Does a meme have to have been <i>produced</i>&nbsp;intentionally? Well - no. Quite the opposite - it's actually very difficult to 'think up' a meme; they are usually observed in the world as their (typically unintended) associative effect is <i>recognized</i>&nbsp;by an observer. You have to <i>see</i>&nbsp;the meme before it can even <i>become</i>&nbsp;a meme. Like this:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y2qQi63CsOQ/WgoHadK2dwI/AAAAAAAAK2s/SZ7t2wBQTgsAAUHtojQZGa7uGT-X4KIQwCLcBGAs/s1600/office-space-guy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="401" data-original-width="480" height="267" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y2qQi63CsOQ/WgoHadK2dwI/AAAAAAAAK2s/SZ7t2wBQTgsAAUHtojQZGa7uGT-X4KIQwCLcBGAs/s320/office-space-guy.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />One more thing, which is a bit of an aside here, so I won't linker on it. When we look at memes we can see in a very direct way how people (and objects, and media) are connected to each other, and we can observe what we'll call a 'signal' propagate from one person to the next to the next. It allows us to think of society as though it were a giant mind.<br /><br />It isn't, of course, but much of what can be said of said of human consciousness can also be said of social consciousness. When commentators say things like "<a href="http://www.fradv.com/stock-market-wants-election-portfolio/">The stock wants...</a>" they are observing phenomena in society that are very similar to phenomena in people and, as we do in such cases, applying intentional language to them. Of course, the stock market does not 'want' any such thing.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>A Kind of Computer</i><br /><i><br /></i>The discussion of things that we have no experience of is essentially impossible, which is why we're reduced to the employment of metaphors, appropriate or not, which discussing them. That's why people use the metaphor of a computer to describe the human mind. They appear to be doing similar things - managing information, drawing conclusions, remembering - and so one naturally leads to the thought of the other.<br /><br />The 'mind as a computer' model is an easy target for Hart. He writes, "it would be no less apt to describe the mind as a kind of abacus. In the physical functions of a computer, there is neither a semantics nor a syntax of meaning. There is nothing resembling thought at all. There is no intentionality, or anything remotely analogous to intentionality or even to the illusion of intentionality."<br /><br />Let's be clear that the mind is not a computer, if only because they are very differently constructed. Compared to a human mind, even the most powerful computers are hopelessly simple. A <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/">human brain</a> has around 86 billion neurons and 85 billion non-neuronal cells, and the number of connections between them is orders of magnitude larger. This is far more complex than any computer. Nor is there any particular evidence that human brains employ the same solutions as those discovered by computer programmers to manage data, such as algorithms, programs, data buffers, or central processing units. At minimum, the evidence suggests that the human brain is what we would describe as a <a href="https://www.extremetech.com/g00/extreme/102187-scientists-create-brain-like-massively-parallel-computer-from-molecules?i10c.encReferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNhLw%3D%3D">massively parallel</a> processor.<br /><br />But Hart's argument here is not, to my mind, successful. It resembles in structure John Searle's <a href="http://cogprints.org/7150/1/10.1.1.83.5248.pdf">Chinese Room</a> argument. In a manner resembling a computer, a person as a library of symbols (data) and instructions on what symbols to produce when given other symbols as input (program). Unknown to the human, these symbols are actually Chinese characters. Assuming the instructions were correct, the person-in-a-room would appear to speak Chinese. But clearly, the person isn't speaking Chinese; they don't understand it at all, they're just following instructions.<br /><br />There are numerous <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/chineser/">responses</a> to Searle's argument, but my response is simply to embrace the conclusion. "There is no intentionality, or anything remotely analogous to intentionality or even to the illusion of intentionality." Right. <i>Just as in the human brain</i>, it would be a fiction to apply intentionality to the Chinese room. There is no 'representation' of an external reality; everything in the person-in-a-room's awareness relates to the input and output that constitute the totality of his experience.<br /><br />When we say that there can be no computer intelligence because they could never attain the same degree of mental consciousness as us, the clear (and urgent) response is: <i>what if they can</i>? It is far more likely that there is nothing special about humans with respect to other animals and, eventually, computers than that there is. Hart says of computer intelligence that "It is a bewitching illusion, but an illusion all the same." But it is more likely that it is the properties he ascribes to humans that are illusions.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>The Manifest Image</i><br /><i><br /></i>"From at least the time of Galileo," writes Hart, "a division was introduced between what Wilfrid Sellars <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674024982/?tag=thenewatl-20">called</a> the 'manifest image' and the 'scientific image'." The scientific image is the external world filled with objects and causes and laws of nature, while the manifest image is "the phenomenal world we experience."<br /><br />For monists, materialists and most scientists, the scientific image is the only image of reality. "The manifest image, by contrast, is a collection of useful illusions, shaped by evolution to provide the interface between our brains and the world, and thus allow us to interact with our environments. The phenomenal qualities that compose our experience, the meanings and intentions that fill our thoughts, the whole world of perception and interpretation — these are merely how the machinery of our nervous systems and brains represent reality to us, for purely practical reasons."<br /><br />The careful reader will be able to see where I will disagree with this statement. There is no sense to be made of the idea that "the machinery of our nervous systems and brains represent reality to us." This ascribes, first of all, a sort of intentionality to our nervous systems and brains that they simply can't have. There is no sense that it is the <i>purpose</i>&nbsp;of&nbsp;&nbsp;nervous systems and brains to represent reality. But more to the point, there's no <i>us</i>&nbsp;over and above our nervous systems and brains to which the representation would be presented. There's no internal 'computer screen'. I don't see Dennett arguing this way, and I certainly don't.<br /><br />The manifest image <i>is</i>&nbsp;the image. <i>Consciousness is sensation</i>, no more, no less. The scientific image, as described by Sellars (and later, famously, by <a href="http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/fraassen-sci-image.pdf">Bas van Fraassen</a>) is a physical construction, if it exists at all, out there in the world. It's an artifact, no more or less real than the <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/story/index.html">Hubble Telescope</a>, and we should be no more likely to expect the Hubble Telescope to be a mysterious inner part of our cognition. But the <i>only</i>&nbsp;reality we experience, either of science, of Hubble, of a chair, or of anything else, is the reality of sensations.<br /><br />I wish it were different; I really do.<br /><br />Dennett's version of things (in Hart's retelling) is the pessimist one. "Dennett’s is simply the standard modern account of how the mind relates to the physical order... that consciousness itself, understood as a real dimension of wholly first-person phenomenal experience and intentional meaning, is itself only another 'user-illusion.'" It's pessimistic because it suggests (much like the existentialists) that all of our hopes and dreams and ambitions and desires don't amount to a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/?ref_=ttqt_qt_tt">hill of beans</a>. And, if we take the perspective of the scientific image, that's probably true.<br /><br />On the other hand, the way I describe the same story, "consciousness itself <i>is</i>&nbsp;the real dimension of wholly first-person phenomenal." All that we are - all that we see and feel and experience and hope and dream - is the most important thing is the world, because that's <i>all</i>&nbsp;that exists. That's <i>why</i>&nbsp;we fight for survival, <i>why</i>&nbsp;we work to make this a better world, <i>why</i>&nbsp;we take the time out for art and sports and leisure.<br /><br />It's not correct to say that consciousness is an illusion; that very statement presupposes some third-part observer that is fooled by the illusion. But it is correct to say that consciousness, as some intrinsically <i>purely mental</i>&nbsp;phenomenon independent of our experiences and possessed of the attributes of necessity and universality, and the capacities of intention and representation - <i>that</i>&nbsp;is an illusion.<br /><br /><br />---&nbsp;<i>The First-Person Vantage</i><br /><i><br /></i>In <i>my</i>&nbsp;life, at least - I can't speak for you - what might be called the 'first person vantage' is pretty much an irreducible. It is not something I derive or infer from other things; it is something of which I have an immediate awareness. That's why Descartes begins with the <i>cogito</i>&nbsp;and why Hart calls Dennett a "fanatic" when "willing to deny not only the analytic authority, but also the actual existence, of the first-person vantage." It seems to fly in the face of our everyday experience.<br /><br />But what Dennett <i>actually</i>&nbsp;denies, I think, is the idea that the first-person vantage is a special source of truth <i>about</i>&nbsp;the external world. As Hart says, "He rejects the very notion that we 'have ‘privileged access’ to the causes and sources of our introspective convictions,' as though knowledge of the causes of consciousness were somehow germane to the issue of knowledge of the experience of consciousness." And - in fact - we don't. That is not to deny that we have sensations of redness or feelings of ennui, but rather, that these do not constitute evidence that other people can examine and weight and measure.<br /><br />Hart raises the zombie question in this context. Put the question to Dennett: could we know that we're not a zombie? "Dennett’s reply is a curt 'No, you don’t'— because, you see, 'The only support for that conviction is the vehemence of the conviction itself.' This is only to say, though, that we cannot <i>deduce</i>&nbsp;that we are not a zombie.<br /><br />In fact, we do not <i>feel</i>&nbsp;that we are zombies. But this feeling does not come from nowhere; it is the result of the totality of our experiences (which include our knowledge of science and physiology and the rest). In a world where zombies are real possibilities, and where convention allows that they walk and talk and look just like the rest of us, then there is no mechanism available to us, over and above our own feelings, that we are not zombies.<br /><br />Or to put the same point another way: you could raise a child and convince him that he is a zombie. You could raise a child and convince him that he is a brain in a vat. Or that he is a spiritual being. Or that he is any number of other metaphysical states. The child, from an internal <i>a priori</i>&nbsp;sense, has no defense against that; he would have <i>at best</i>&nbsp;an internal feeling that he is wrong. That's when indoctrination works, even when we feel in our hearts that it shouldn't.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Illusions</i><br /><br />Let's take this a step further. Hart imagines that the zombie argument is indefensible because "a zombie could not unwittingly imagine anything, since he would possess no consciousness at all, let alone reflective consciousness; that is the whole point of the imaginative exercise." Let us suppose that this is true. It is simply the contrapositive. <i>If you have no sensory experiences at all, you have no way to know you are not a zombie</i>. The <i>only</i>&nbsp;way you could know that you're not a zombie is that you have the feeling that you're not one.<br /><br />Hart is asserts that "you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds." This sounds like the same point I have just made, but it is not, because his idea of what constitutes a 'conscious mind' is very different from mine. <i>His</i>&nbsp;conscious mind includes necessity and intentionality and all the rest. But do you need all that to be fooled by an illusion? No.<br /><br />Artificial intelligence (and in particular, neural networks) can also have illusions. There was one <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/2/16597276/google-ai-image-attacks-adversarial-turtle-rifle-3d-printed">covered</a> just recently where Google's artificial intelligence thought that a turtle is a purse. "It's likely possible that one could construct a yard sale sign which to human drivers appears entirely ordinary, but might appear to a self-driving car as a pedestrian which suddenly appears next to the street,” write labsix, the team of students from MIT who <a href="http://www.labsix.org/physical-objects-that-fool-neural-nets/">published the research</a>."<br /><br />There's nothing special about being fooled by an illusion at all. Cats are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg-RsTrHmBU">fooled</a> all the time. So are thermostats (which 'thinks' a house is cold, thus firing up the furnace, when I open a window). So are photo-sensors (famously, by <a href="http://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/how-to-fool-a-motion-sensing-lighting-control.108640/">mirrors</a>, at least in the movies).<br /><br />And just so, it is possible for us to be fooled about our own consciousness, to associate properties of the physical world to the nature of our own experience. We see one billiard ball strike another and cause it to move, and we suppose that the same thing happens in our thoughts. We see a mathematical proof showing the necessity of an axiom, and we suppose the same thing of our thoughts. There's no reason to suppose these things, of course. We just naturally associate things that appear similar.<br /><br />Hart says, "the limpid immediacy and incommunicable privacy of consciousness is utterly unlike the composite, objective, material sequences of physical causality in the brain, and seems impossible to explain in terms of that causality — and yet exists nonetheless, and exists more surely than any presumed world 'out there.'" But that's just another illusion. It's not impossible to explain in terms of science and causality - that's Dennett's point. And when sensation ceases, so does consciousness: that's mine.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>Emergent Properties</i><br /><i><br /></i>We have discussed the concept of emergence previously. Above, we described the idea of emergence in the sense of coming into being or production, in contrast to the idea of emergence as a pattern that arises out of complex phenomena. It is important that we distinguish between the two lest we make the mistake of <a href="http://peggyholman.com/papers/engaging-emergence/engaging-emergence-table-of-contents/part-i-the-nature-of-emergence/chapter-1-what-is-emergence/">thinking</a> of emergence as a type of cause or force.<br /><br />Dennett's account appears to contain elements of both, and this leads to confusion. "The point of From Bacteria to Bach and Back is to show that minds are only emergent properties of our brains, and brains only aggregates of mindless elements and forces," writes Hart. "But it shows nothing of the sort." Well, it does, but it tells two stories in one, one for each sense of emergence.<br /><br />Here's the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/02/from-bacteria-to-bach-and-back-by-daniel-c-dennett-review">official version</a> of the story: "mind and consciousness are no more and no less mysterious than other natural phenomena, such as gravity. Granted the right chemical and physical conditions, life forms will emerge from the primeval slime, and granted the right conditions, life will evolve large-brained organisms such as humans (who) communicate, cooperate and compete with their fellows."<br /><br />This is a classic statement employing the first sense of the word 'emergence'. We're telling a causal story here as a way of explaining how a conscious and intelligent being came to come into existence. It's a claim that doesn't need special mental powers; on this story, we did not 'will ourselves' into existence, nor could we have, without violating the totality of what we know about nature and physics.<br /><br />Dennett's argument also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/02/from-bacteria-to-bach-and-back-by-daniel-c-dennett-review">contains this bit</a>: "Consciousness is a system property, and is not reducible: he takes issue with those hard-line molecular biologists, notably DNA pioneer Francis Crick, who seek to locate consciousness in particular ensembles of neurons in specific brain regions."<br /><br />When we say "Consciousness is a system property" what we mean is that consciousness is an emergent property. Specifically, here, the assertion is that the consciousness we experience is an emergent property of the interactions between and activations of neural systems." Whether or not we say it arises from <i>all</i>&nbsp;neurons (as suggested here) or <i>some</i>&nbsp;neurons (as I suggest above, consistent with Crick's view) is a matter of empirical investigation (specifically: is it possible to have the same conscious sensation given different neural configurations).<br /><br />What's important is that, as stated above, emergent properties do not have independent or inherent existence. Something constitutes an emergent property only insofar as it is <i>recognized</i>&nbsp;as such. That is why we say that things like language, logic, meaning and representation are physical properties, not mental properties. They are not 'in' the mind as somehow innate, but are recognized as such perceptually, as the social constructs containing theme were developed, generation after generation, through history.<br /><br />That's why their appearance seems so sudden. They emerged, rapidly, as cultural artifacts. "Slow biological evolution has been superseded by fast cultural evolution. This too advances through natural selection, and the agents on which such selection operates are memes, the cultural analogues of genes." The social network operates on essentially the same principles as the neural network, and through the process of <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389041715000327">stigmergy</a>, one concept piles up on another, until out of complex interaction, we are suddenly able to see a pattern, a mosaic, a fantastic construct.<br /><br />The properties or attributes of consciousness we talk about on an everyday basis aren't actually there. They are, like memes, patterns of expression or thought that have characterized social discourse over time. All that there is <i>actually</i>&nbsp;to consciousness is sensation. Everything else we think we 'know' about it is a social construct (up to and even including the <i><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bodysphere/features/5267698">names of the senses</a></i>).<br /><br /><br />---&nbsp;<i>Free Will</i><br /><i><br /></i>I want to attend briefly to a subject not explicitly addressed in Hart's review, that of free will.<br /><br />We've addressed the dilemma of free will and determinism above by suggesting that 'determinism' is a representation of the way the world and our bodies work. We can have both materialism and non-determinism at the same time.<br /><br />But what about the idea that there an individual, an ego, an I, that has fears and hopes, that wants things, that makes decisions, that evaluates things and makes judgments, and expresses all the other elements of what we might cluster under the heading of 'free will'.<br /><br />There are two elements to this story.<br /><br />The first is that the concept of identity, the self, and the individual, is very much a social construction. Not all people in the world today, let alone all people in the world through history, conceive of the self in the same way. This is no more evident than in the <a href="https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/the-self-in-east-and-west/">differing ideas</a> of the relation between the self and society in western and oriental societies. There is a significant literature and <a href="http://cf.linnbenton.edu/artcom/social_science/dayer/upload/Chpt%206%20identity%20anth210.pdf">domain of study</a> about the cultural construction of self.<br /><br />The other part concerns the actual <i>feelings</i>&nbsp;we have of want (or satiation), of worth (or worthlessness), of hope (or fear), and more. These are feelings, they are sensations, our having of them does not justify an inference that there is a 'self' that is having them, only that they are a part of our consciousness.<br /><br />It is a familiar cognitive exercise (to me, at least) to identify the feeling that accompanies what I describe as a hope or a fear or whatever (mainly fear). the exercise is, essentially, to feel the feeling, recognize it as a <i>sensation</i>, and to realize to myself "<a href="http://depressionisalyingbastard.tumblr.com/post/92737018157/uk-charity-mind-campaigns-for-better-mental-health">the mind is a lying bastard</a>". <a href="https://www.helpguide.org/articles/anxiety/therapy-for-anxiety-disorders.htm">Cognitive therapy</a> may not extinguish the feeling of anxiety (you need drugs for that) but it can help you understand it.<br /><br /><br />--- <i>The End</i><br /><i><br /></i>Even if there is life after death, if there is an end to sensation there is an end to <i>us</i>, and what follows doesn't really matter. I think we're all aware if this to some degree, and as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2761.The_Denial_of_Death">Becker points out</a>, we spend the better part of our existence in denial of this.<br /><br />"If only we could go on living forever," we think, forgetting (or not realizing) that 'forever' is itself a fabrication of our imagination, no more comprehensible than necessity or universals or absolute nothingness.<br /><br />"Maybe there <i>is</i>&nbsp;a thing that lives forever," we think, perhaps a gene, a meme, a society, a culture, an artifact, an identity, a soul. But we forget that none of these <i>is us</i>, because our conscious existence is, and will always be, only our sensation.<br /><br />There is solace, perhaps, to be found in the idea that there is something greater than ourselves, that we may be a part of, and have an impact on, something greater than ourselves, and even if this is the beginning and end of our existence, the <i>feeling&nbsp;</i>of that existence will be satisfactory. Some people find their consolation in <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm">philosophy</a>, some people find their solace in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080716/">fame</a>.<br /><br />For me, the lesson I draw, is that <i>life is everything</i>. This applies to my own life, of course, but I also extend the same feeling to those around me, whose existence I can only comprehend through science and culture, but whose dilemma I assume is the same as mine, that is, that it is the quality (and duration, and variety, and related properties) of their experience that overwhelms everything else.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rf2a58jjhRU/Wgs4LPxAtVI/AAAAAAAAK3c/3vcqIJ6hbQgVjsLdT6YUsD4GJV0YJFk6wCLcBGAs/s1600/roberts.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="938" height="239" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rf2a58jjhRU/Wgs4LPxAtVI/AAAAAAAAK3c/3vcqIJ6hbQgVjsLdT6YUsD4GJV0YJFk6wCLcBGAs/s320/roberts.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/11/consciousness.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-2284108399540445810Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:50:00 +00002017-11-09T07:51:18.673-05:00If We Talked About the Internet Like We Talk About OERDavid Wiley offers a provocative perspective titled&nbsp;<a href="https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/5219">If We Talked About the Internet Like We Talk About OER: The Cost Trap and Inclusive Access</a>. Here's how he sets it up:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Imagine that – somehow – you’ve never used the internet before. A good friend and long-time internet user finds this out and begins trying to describe to you how awesome the internet is. However, for some inexplicable reason, all of his arguments for why you should be on the internet focus on cost. </blockquote>He follows this with a series of images showing services such as gMail, Instagram and Wikipedia with a slogan emphasizing how it is cheaper than its alternative. "Wikipedia: cheaper than Encyclopedia Britannica," for example. He then argues,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">While it is absolutely true that each of these services is cheaper than its pre-internet counterpart, cost is far and away the least interesting thing about any of them. Would these arguments actually inspire someone to want to use the internet? If you’re already familiar with the internet, the whole line of argument seems to miss the point. It omits the heart and soul of what makes the internet amazing. Who thinks about the internet this way? </blockquote>I do.<br /><br />I was around in the pre-internet days. I remember life without an internet. I remember when online access was granted through services like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe">Compuserv</a>, which would cost me (had I been able to afford it) $6 per hour. Other services were even more expensive. <a href="https://www.forevergeek.com/what_did_online_access_cost_per_hour_in_1995/">Remember?</a><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">When you look at what we pay for high speed Internet access now, it’s almost hard to imagine it ever being another way…but it was…oh boy, it was. In 1995 getting online was done in an almost completely different way, and access to online services were charged for, in most cases, BY THE MINUTE like a long distance phone call. </blockquote>Like pretty much every other internet user in the late 1980s and early 1990s I accessed it for free through university access on campus. I was also able to dial in via modem when I lived in the city. Outside the city I incurred long distance charges, which I passed on (when I could) to Athabasca University. I ended up incurring thousands of dollars in internet debt by 1995. Fortunately I got a job in Manitoba and was able to escape the trap.<br /><br />In Brandon I was determined that the scenario would not be repeated. With a group of people I worked on a project called Brandon Freenet, later called the Westman Community Network (because some jerk trademarked the term 'Freenet' and would't let anyone use it). It was part of a wider <a href="https://www.ncf.ca/ncf/freeport2html/conferences/com-net94/directories.html">network of freenets</a>&nbsp;across Canada and the United States. A lot of them don't exist any more; some of them <a href="https://www.ncf.ca/">still do</a>, because there's still a need.<br /><br />It wasn't easy, especially once commercial internet came on to the scene. In Brandon, the only internet access point was Brandon University; the college and everyone else in the city went through BU. We raised money, purchased access, and made it available at low cost (and in some cases, for free). But we ran into issues because come computer science professors at the university launched a commercial service, called Docker, and it became more and more difficult to maintain our community service. Docker eventually sold out to (I believe) Bell and the professors did just fine.<br /><br />There was a time when free public access to the internet was in the balance. Many communities (and community organizations, like our own) wanted to provide it as an essential social service. Commercial internet providers did what they do best, and virtually eliminated the competition. Not though the free market; don't be silly! They lobbied and in some cases sued and made community internet access illegal. Like they did <a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a37v4z/big-telecom-spent-dollar200000-to-try-to-prevent-a-colorado-town-from-even-talking-about-a-city-run-internet">in Colorado</a>. Like they did <a href="https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/07/telco-wont-install-fiber-sues-to-keep-city-from-doing-it/">in Minnesota</a>. Like they did <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-comcast-fcc-high-speed-internet-gigabit">in Tennessee</a>.<br /><br />Commercial access providers don't actually like the free market. People and governments <i>could</i>&nbsp;provide internet access for much less than it costs today. Most of the backbone is <i>already</i>&nbsp;underwritten by the taxpayer, and a lot of local infrastructure is as well. But commercial providers do everything they can to ensure limited, and often monopoly, access to the last mile.<br /><br />So yeah, Dave - it's about the money.<br /><br />---<br /><br />Why does this matter? Why does David Wiley even raise the point? It has to do with textbook publishing, and in particular, something called 'inclusive access' to commercially published textbooks in university courses.<br /><br />I covered this a <a href="http://www.downes.ca/author/16553">couple</a> of <a href="http://www.downes.ca/post/66334">times</a> last winter in OLDaily. Wiley is responding to an Inside Higher Ed article published yesterday called <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/07/inclusive-access-takes-model-college-textbook-sales">'Inclusive Access Takes Off</a>. The core idea of this <strike>scam</strike> purchasing plan is that<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">instead of buying textbooks with credit cards or cash, students can be automatically charged for course materials by the institution when they enroll.... Publishers previously lost a lot of revenue from textbooks because many students bought secondhand, rented, pirated or just skipped buying textbooks altogether. Inclusive-access programs have changed that. </blockquote>The article touts savings of "up to" 70 percent. There's no reason to believe these savings will persist once the publishers have locked up monopoly access to sales of course materials. And of course they are well into the process of depicting community-based access (such as sharing or reselling texts) as "illegal".<br /><br />Wiley responds as follows:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">While everyone wants educational materials to be less expensive, lower costs are the least interesting thing about digital, networked learning...&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">By focusing on cost, the article takes a page directly from the publishers’ playbook. Keeping the conversation laser-focused on cost is the core of their defensive strategy with regard to OER. Because when you think the problem to be solved is the high cost of textbooks, the way you solve that problem is by lowering the cost of textbooks.</blockquote>This is an interesting perspective. The core issue here, argues Wiley, is one of permissions, not cost. The argument based on cost is just a distraction. It allows publishers to respond to the challenge of OER by lowering their prices, while all the while maintaining their lock on content, preventing anyone from reusing (or sharing, or whatever).<br /><br />And because of this, he argues, we lose the <i>advantages</i>&nbsp;of OER (just like, he says, we lose the advantages of the internet if we're only focused on internet access costs).<br /><br />---<br /><br />Here's how he expresses the 'advantages of OER' argument:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">When, o when will we turn our attention in earnest to OER-enabled pedagogy – to all the teaching and learning practices (and associated benefits) that are possible only in the context of OER adoption? When will we stop focusing on cost to the exclusion of other benefits? ...&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Every time we focus a conversation about OER on cost, we simultaneously strengthen the arguments in favor of inclusive access. </blockquote>I like to keep the language clean in my posts, but it's difficult. Oh so difficult.<br /><br />There are two problems with this line of argumentation. I'll deal with the easy one first: we <i>are</i>&nbsp;focused on the advantages of OER-enabled pedagogy. What do you think the whole MOOC thing George Siemens and I and others was about? <a href="http://www.downes.ca/presentation/66">Beginning in 2003</a> and continuing consistently thereafter I have depicted learning resources as <i>words in a conversation</i>, and applied the logic of language to the logic of reuse. In 2006 I described and recommended the community-based model to support sustainable <a href="https://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/36781698.pdf">OER-based pedagogy</a>.<br /><br />In the intervening years we've seen no support from David Wiley with respect to this alternative model. His focus has been on traditional institutions of learning and the traditional classroom model. When he has worked toward the production of OERs, it was to produce textbooks. I've spent years working toward a pedagogy of sharing and networks and communities enabled (partially) by open educational resources; Wiley has appeared disinterested. <a href="https://blog.openassembly.com/2014/02/12/david-wiley-comments-on-the-mooc-hype/">He says</a> the discussion of MOOCs "has sucked the air out of conversation around innovation in education."<br /><br />Now to be fair, <a href="https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3557">his criticism</a> is that "the horrific corruption perpetrated by the Udacity, Coursera, and other copycat MOOCs is to pretend that the last forty years never happened." But the <i>problem</i>&nbsp;he sees with these MOOCs isn't the pedagogical model <i>per se</i>, it's that they have the wrong licensing. "I believe we must ground our open thinking in the idea of open licenses. Specifically, we should advocate for open in the language of the 5Rs," he writes. And this has been his position consistently for a number of years.<br /><br />And this brings us to the second problem with his line of reasoning. It's this: the reason people talk about the cost of open educational resources is because some people - David Wiley included - think it's an essential part of 'open' that the resources be commercialized and that vendors charge money from them. <i>Of course</i>&nbsp;he wants us to stop talking about cost - that would deflect the criticism of his own business model. <a href="https://lumenlearning.com/">Lumen Learning</a> is in the same business as&nbsp;&nbsp;Pearson, Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education: selling textbooks (directly or indirectly) to students.<br /><br />That, to me, makes them, and him, part of the problem. And it makes him even more complicit in the problem when he accuses people of 'not talking about open pedagogy' when they take a perspective that is not based in the precious 5 Rs.<br /><br />---<br /><br />We've <a href="http://www.downes.ca/files/books/Downes-Wiley.pdf">had this discussion</a> before, at length, and some would say, <i>ad nauseum</i>. The debate around open pedagogy is just the latest incarnation.<br /><br />At core, Wiley sees 'commercial' as good, while I don't. More accurately, I think, Wiley sees 'commercial' as the <i>only</i>&nbsp;good, while I think that public and community-based non-commercial alternatives are equally viable.<br /><br />This is certainly how the debate about licensing has played out. My position is that, first, I choose to use a non-commercial license, and I tell people that they should feel free to use <i>any</i>&nbsp;of the Creative Commons licenses on their open educational resources. Wiley (and a cluster of other OER advocates) insist that creators must use a CC-by license, allowing commercial use, if they want their work to be considered open.<br /><br />The difference arises essentially because I consider learning and pedagogy to be non-commercial enterprises. This is <i>especially</i>&nbsp;the case when, as I advocate, OERs are created by students as a part of their studies for sharing with and use by other students (like words in a conversation). And I see no good reason why we should require the production of educators and students to be fair game for resellers who want to pluck it for free out of the commons and charge money for it to those not lucky enough to be a part of our community.<br /><br />So when I see somebody saying "you shouldn't argue about price" and "you must allow commercial reuse of OERs" I see somebody who is not only not talking about pedagogy, I see someone who is trying to <i>destroy </i>open pedagogy, by destroying communities and replacing them with companies. I see someone who can't get past the idea of education as something that is <i>provided</i>&nbsp;by a university or publisher or whatever, and not possibly created by people working together on their own.<br /><br />You want me to stop talking about cost, David? Stop charging money for something that should be free. Return education to the community network. Help work with us together without putting a price tag on it.<br /><br />https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/11/if-we-talked-about-internet-like-we.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-6540675958130881854Thu, 26 Oct 2017 18:09:00 +00002017-10-26T14:12:01.970-04:00Let's Take the Digital License Quiz<a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2017/10/18/digital-drivers-licence/">This article</a> in a London School of Economic blog&nbsp;touts the benefits of the <a href="https://www.digitallicence.com.au/" target="_blank">digital driver’s licence</a>&nbsp;created by the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amf.org.au/" target="_blank">Alannah &amp; Madeline Foundation</a>&nbsp;in Australia, and notes that some&nbsp;<a href="https://www.esmart.org.au/news-events/one-year-on-177-000-students-are-safer-online-thanks-to-the-digital-licence/">22% of Australian schools</a>&nbsp;have registered for it.<br /><br />Ultimately I thought the article was naive, failing to look at the actual content provided, and simply leaping to the conclusion that if it's about digital literacy it must be good. Far from it, as I discovered when I looked more deeply.<br /><br />In particular, I took this quiz and got a failing grade, answering only 6 of 10 questions correctly.&nbsp;Since I don't think that my knowledge of the internet is badly flawed, I conclude that the test is.<span style="color: #888888;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>Let's examine why.<br /><br /><b>Question 1</b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LNvU3Ya77xk/WfH0knqT8NI/AAAAAAAAKpY/hnTS1RJRycExkW2OAUJVibqqT9i2P__VgCLcBGAs/s1600/q1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="631" data-original-width="842" height="298" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LNvU3Ya77xk/WfH0knqT8NI/AAAAAAAAKpY/hnTS1RJRycExkW2OAUJVibqqT9i2P__VgCLcBGAs/s400/q1.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br />I got this question wrong. In the context of this question, I only two of the suggestions were positive: apologizing, and taking it down. One was obviously not positive: ignoring them. The other three have ambiguous degrees of positivity, and a viable suggestion was omitted entirely.<br /><br />- Explain that you didn't mean it - this might be appropriate if you actually didn't mean it, but that's really a minority of cases. You probably actually did mean it. Which would mean this is a transparent lie, and would probably make the situation worse (it's also the goto strategy for the lulz crowd).<br /><br />- Let the website operators know - this assumes you are not your own website operator. In some cases letting the operators know will be helpful, because they may be able to remove the post in cases where you can't. Typically no harm will result; they'll probably just ignore you.<br /><br />- Reassure them that the post won't be visible for long - this represents an effort to mitigate the damage (assuming it's true) but may be of little comfort to the upset person. It's probably better than lying to them, though.<br /><br />Of these unsatisfying alternatives, I chose 'let the website operators know' as the least bad. The correct answer was 'explain that you didn't mean it' - in other words, to lie to them. Terrible. As for the missing response, it was this:<br /><br />- Stand by your post and explain your reasoning - a lot of the time you can't back down just because what you said is upsetting to someone (because <i>everything</i>&nbsp;you post is upsetting to <i>someone</i>). Making your reasoning clear won't make them less upset, but addresses third parties observing the dispute and shows that you weren't carelessly disrespectful, but considered what you said (and its possible impact) beforehand.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YqzF5kC3eR8/WfH3omQrgPI/AAAAAAAAKpk/OiC1krmizkMPFuSPkEaeZ-pDmIBqHl86gCLcBGAs/s1600/a1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="636" data-original-width="847" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YqzF5kC3eR8/WfH3omQrgPI/AAAAAAAAKpk/OiC1krmizkMPFuSPkEaeZ-pDmIBqHl86gCLcBGAs/s400/a1.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">*sigh*</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Question 2</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bY8jmAexHao/WfH4UhY7zEI/AAAAAAAAKps/VwnkKeUkodEKsATwl8461aLJpN1b1xIJwCLcBGAs/s1600/q2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="629" data-original-width="840" height="298" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bY8jmAexHao/WfH4UhY7zEI/AAAAAAAAKps/VwnkKeUkodEKsATwl8461aLJpN1b1xIJwCLcBGAs/s400/q2.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The answer I chose, and the correct answer, was 'Too hard to say." It was a pretty obvious choice.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">What would have made the choice a lot less obvious would have been to have an option of 'Forever'. This would especially be the case if the designers mean the same thing by 'posts' as I would (which I doubt). A 'post' is a type of message typically <i>intended</i>&nbsp;for persistence, so 'Forever' is a viable choice.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">What people need to understand is that while posts might last a lot longer than they expect, up to and including 'forever', they often last <i>less</i>&nbsp;long than they expect, including 'not forever'. This is why people <i>take screenshots</i>&nbsp;of questionable or dubious content: that way there's evidence that it existed. This can be an important part of digital self-protection, but is completely overlooked here.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1EpQ6owZyso/WfH54GA_pjI/AAAAAAAAKp4/2VQFuW-UhkglRPP0yCiFD5-d_2xx5fnGgCLcBGAs/s1600/a2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="636" data-original-width="849" height="298" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1EpQ6owZyso/WfH54GA_pjI/AAAAAAAAKp4/2VQFuW-UhkglRPP0yCiFD5-d_2xx5fnGgCLcBGAs/s400/a2.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It says "A copy of your content will remain on the site." See, this is untrue. A copy of the post <i>might</i>&nbsp;remain on the website. If I delete your content from my website, it's gone. Or it might be in someone's cache, or screen-captured. Or it might have vanished forever. You just don't know.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Question 3</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BhzgIEAZv3E/WfH6zLFwefI/AAAAAAAAKqE/51DhcOn1yWIQKgTig2bbfJ831zc45ddpACLcBGAs/s1600/q3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="629" data-original-width="848" height="296" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BhzgIEAZv3E/WfH6zLFwefI/AAAAAAAAKqE/51DhcOn1yWIQKgTig2bbfJ831zc45ddpACLcBGAs/s400/q3.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I've never heard of 'Zombie Blast', so I didn't pick this (though it might have been a stand-in for 'Games' such as Candy Crush, but I decided to interpret it literally).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Otherwise, it could be any of the remaining five. I've never bought a smartphone without Twitter pre-installed. My smartphones have also included a spell-checker (and word replace) which I find really annoying. They all have some sort of 'list' or 'todo' application. They all have a maps application. And of course they all have shopping, either directly from the OS (Apple store, Play store, etc), from the manufacturer (Samsung store), or third party applications.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So answering this question became a game of "what hazard are they trying to protect me from"? None of them is harmless, though. Each carries risks.&nbsp;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So I selected 'Shopping'. It's the application with the biggest risk. You can easily accrue extra charges on your phone bill, run up credit card debts, lose your personal information, accidentally sign up for repeated billing, and more. People forget that their smartphone is primarily a <i>marketing tool</i>&nbsp;for providers.&nbsp;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This was one of the questions I got wrong.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5jbGKGbk744/WfH9gLdMbWI/AAAAAAAAKqQ/waitXX2cvskcbKTkl2aHEXyPNuo37jWcgCLcBGAs/s1600/a3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="637" data-original-width="851" height="298" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5jbGKGbk744/WfH9gLdMbWI/AAAAAAAAKqQ/waitXX2cvskcbKTkl2aHEXyPNuo37jWcgCLcBGAs/s400/a3.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Ah! They were trying to warn me about <i>geo-location</i>.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Well - yeah - it can be kind of creepy that your phone tracks you and knows where you are. But there are two things wrong with this answer:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- First, you have to turn geo-location on. On my smartphones, at least, applications (including maps) actually <i>ask permission</i>&nbsp;before using geo-location, so I explicitly allow it to record my location. And in fact, I don't have any particular problem with this, and it could actually help rescuers if I ever got into a bad situation.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- Second, the maps program <i>runs just fine</i>&nbsp;even if you don't have geo-locator turned on. The only thing missing is the black dot identifying 'your location'. Everything else works just fine, because a map doesn't need to know where you are.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Prudence is a good thing to encourage in people. Paranoia isn't . This question caters to paranoia, and ignores a valuable occasion for prudence.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Question 4</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z7IyonR1c1M/WfIY4NMvsTI/AAAAAAAAKs0/1rMylqojSjcJoj7opbmeQZCcCtEyzKrGgCEwYBhgL/s1600/q4a.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="847" height="302" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z7IyonR1c1M/WfIY4NMvsTI/AAAAAAAAKs0/1rMylqojSjcJoj7opbmeQZCcCtEyzKrGgCEwYBhgL/s400/q4a.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I honestly have no idea why the Submit button uses a dollar sign as an icon. I gave up trying to figure out the association.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Each dropdown offers all four alternatives. I've displayed them in the order I selected. It seemed reasonable to me. But alas...</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3NNrfBq2C_w/WfIY33BkgoI/AAAAAAAAKss/KT7lukys8Bo50y4m74xMMiFH1RROtdu_gCEwYBhgL/s1600/a4a.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="637" data-original-width="849" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3NNrfBq2C_w/WfIY33BkgoI/AAAAAAAAKss/KT7lukys8Bo50y4m74xMMiFH1RROtdu_gCEwYBhgL/s400/a4a.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">If I start in the morning, I can play all day before I get tired. But my thumbs get sore long before that (assuming I'm using a game controller; most games I play using the keyboard, which means my thumbs never get sore - but I digress).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I am not sure the top option is even the result of playing a game too much. I can imagine a number of psychological disorders than might cause but, and I can imagine a person playing a game constantly without ever confusing it with reality. And sometimes, when reality resembles the game, it's not a bad thing (for example, when a real hockey game resembles a video hockey game).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And ultimately, after this first extreme case, I think the order is pretty arbitrary. The suggestion in all cases is that the game <i>causes</i>&nbsp;these symptoms, but absent this explicit causal relationship the four things listed aren't signs of playing too much at all.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The clue that this question is wrong-headed is found in the answer where it says "games can be outrageously addictive". Look at (professional) websites that offer people quizzes on whether they're addicted to this or that. They are very clear to ask people to <i>look at what using the thing does</i>, and often this has nothing to do with physical symptoms but rather 'inability to stop', 'making sacrifices', 'harming relationships', and 'taking risks', among others.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The options provided in this question have little or nothing to do with addition, which suggests that the content informing the question was simply made up, and not based on any research or evidence at all.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Question 5</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cBdmYSSxNQo/WfIAiJAFkfI/AAAAAAAAKqw/SDVQDwRaYsEnDjL0lPnsneunDL5LrFTkQCLcBGAs/s1600/q5.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="840" height="303" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cBdmYSSxNQo/WfIAiJAFkfI/AAAAAAAAKqw/SDVQDwRaYsEnDjL0lPnsneunDL5LrFTkQCLcBGAs/s400/q5.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">OK, I got this right, but I still think it was a poor question.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The <i>standard</i>&nbsp;response to a question like this is "turn it off and then on again". However, this set of answers only allows the option to turn the <i>monitor</i>&nbsp;off and on. That's a bit weird; most computers (laptops and phones for example) don't even have the option to turn off a monitor. In any case, merely fiddling with the display will usually do nothing.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So, what, then? Saying a rude word won't work (not yet, at least - but I think it would be a popular sort of voice-activated command).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So that leaves us with two options: type some words, or close the program or process. But here's the problem: <i>the computer is frozen</i>. This means that <i>nothing</i>&nbsp;will happen if I try doing something.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Ultimately I picked the correct answer: close the program or process. This requires assuming that when they said 'the computer is frozen' they meant 'some application is frozen'. The usual solution is to hit Ctl-Alt-Delete for a windows computer (Cmd-Opt-Esc on a Mac) and select the frozen program. I don't think there's an equivalent on smartphones, so you're back to turning it off and on again.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SaKf4jZljtg/WfIC6_xe7YI/AAAAAAAAKq8/UNMAbtg1IfcvHip6LaLwLS-9BzkKLEIhwCLcBGAs/s1600/a5.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="632" data-original-width="850" height="296" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SaKf4jZljtg/WfIC6_xe7YI/AAAAAAAAKq8/UNMAbtg1IfcvHip6LaLwLS-9BzkKLEIhwCLcBGAs/s400/a5.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">After the computer freezes, of course, it's too late to save your work (unless you have one of those miracle freezes where you can still do things like type or close programs). Most programs have an 'auto-save' function. If you're working in the cloud the windows often save on update or changes. 'Saving your work' looks looks very different today than it did a decade ago.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Always have a backup. This is good advice even if your computer never freezes.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Question 6</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gG6RdEnU1gY/WfIDyU28MkI/AAAAAAAAKrE/FkiX8Pbw0dASfMvbN5cj5pasiYWyVCOFACLcBGAs/s1600/q6.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="637" data-original-width="843" height="301" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gG6RdEnU1gY/WfIDyU28MkI/AAAAAAAAKrE/FkiX8Pbw0dASfMvbN5cj5pasiYWyVCOFACLcBGAs/s400/q6.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Asking what IM apps <i>may</i>&nbsp;record is like asking what <i>might</i>&nbsp;go wrong, and the correct answer to such a question is: anything. Questions able what is possible are like that. Anything is possible, but what's <i>really</i>&nbsp;important is what is likely or probable.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This question ignores that, which tells me that what it's trying to warn you about is the instant messaging app itself. I'm not sure why, exactly.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So anyhow, I selected everything <i>except</i>&nbsp;'None of these things' simply as a matter of pure logic. And I was right.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Np146XSJd7w/WfIEqU97pLI/AAAAAAAAKrM/uXjK82va1LcJfvZVqruQw0Fm1kAvfDSGgCLcBGAs/s1600/a6.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="631" data-original-width="848" height="297" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Np146XSJd7w/WfIEqU97pLI/AAAAAAAAKrM/uXjK82va1LcJfvZVqruQw0Fm1kAvfDSGgCLcBGAs/s400/a6.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This response makes it clear that, yes, they're warning you about messaging apps generally.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I puzzled for a bit about what they meant by "record" exactly. Because, unless the messaging app actually has the information, you can't use any of these things. It would require a miracle to be able to share content without the app somehow recording that content.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So I think the sense the authors meant was 'secretly record and retain' or ';record without your permission' or some such thing. It's unclear.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I also wondered how apps without photo filters (which is almost all of them) record which photo filter you're using. But I decided that this test didn't worry about that level of detail.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As to the answer: there's no such thing as an applications "terms of privacy". They're called "terms of service" (or TOS) and while they usually include a section on privacy, experience suggests that most apps do whatever they want no matter what their terms say. I'm also unsure what "help" an adult is going to provide in such circumstances beyond saying "these apps spy on you".</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Question 7</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DRhbGQcIBS8/WfIHnWKI_YI/AAAAAAAAKrY/fEP3u9xVAWkt15YT8c3K6SHn7LVMf-YUwCLcBGAs/s1600/q7.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="842" height="298" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DRhbGQcIBS8/WfIHnWKI_YI/AAAAAAAAKrY/fEP3u9xVAWkt15YT8c3K6SHn7LVMf-YUwCLcBGAs/s400/q7.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I don't think that yellow text on a yellow background was the best design choice here.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The actual reason a website appears first is "because it's an advertisement". After that, the order of results is based on the search engine algorithm. Unfortunately, neither of these appears as an answer to this question.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">According to the logic of possibility, any of these <i>may</i>&nbsp;be a reason why a result ends up on the first page. So I chose everything, even some things that didn't make sense.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">What didn't make sense? Well, this: "It's a common search term." But search terms, common or otherwise, are not "search engine results". They are search engine <i>input. </i>The best guess I have here for what the author meant is that the common search term produced a particular result. But that doesn't make much sense at all.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This also didn't make sense: "The webpage has lots of key words/terms." I think maybe the author meant "The web page has lots of keywords" but then decided "words" wasn't inclusive enough and so added "terms", and in so doing separated the word "key" from "words", which is now a totally different thing, but whatever. And then joined "web" and "page" into a single work, because hey, it's a free-for-all, amiright?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Anyhow, like I said, I selected everything, and not surprisingly, got it wrong. But not for the reason I was expecting.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HTEb3_w_Y1A/WfIKcxgGgQI/AAAAAAAAKrk/cJAoytXGYi4yoU-YjHzsIO-bJV-8mm6sgCLcBGAs/s1600/a7.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="636" data-original-width="844" height="301" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HTEb3_w_Y1A/WfIKcxgGgQI/AAAAAAAAKrk/cJAoytXGYi4yoU-YjHzsIO-bJV-8mm6sgCLcBGAs/s400/a7.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm not exactly sure what to make of this non-explanation, but it looks at first blush that I was wrong because I included "It's the most relevant result to your search." Of course, the <i>most</i>&nbsp;likely reason something is on the first page (besides being an ad) is that it is what you were looking for, I tried selecting <i>just</i>&nbsp;that, and it was wrong also.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In fact, I tried about a dozen different combinations of answers (which requires running the entire slow-moving Flash animation from the beginning) and still don't know what the correct response was. Everything I selected was wrong. No single response it correct, so it's one magic combination of the responses (if the right answer exists at all).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I also learned three things while playing this game over and over and over:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- The audio icon (upper right) turns the spoken word version of the text off and on. But it does not turn the sound effects on or off. There's nothing you can do about the sound effects.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- The text in the answers is the same whether you get the answer correct or incorrect</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- There are three dark-skinned characters, and all the rest are light-skinned. All three dark-skinned characters appear when the answer is incorrect, and the dark skinned characters never appear when the answer is correct.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Question 8</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Wq3c7Yvlnog/WfIRp5yIQLI/AAAAAAAAKr0/mrE9GfwK6LomX68Eov17nlNtzFvhJZ3kwCLcBGAs/s1600/q8.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="633" data-original-width="839" height="301" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Wq3c7Yvlnog/WfIRp5yIQLI/AAAAAAAAKr0/mrE9GfwK6LomX68Eov17nlNtzFvhJZ3kwCLcBGAs/s400/q8.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This was the first question I got when I tried this quiz for the first time and it made me smile. I liked the humour. The last two answers were obviously incorrect, but funny.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So the right answer is obviously 'Advertisements'.&nbsp;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It could also have been either of the other two (they're pirates, so they're passing off the work as their own, right?) but only in very limited or unusual cases. So this was a very straightforward and easy answer.&nbsp;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">A dark skinned guy (south Asian from the look of him) pops up in the unlikely event that you get this one wrong.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IrnkkkKcaRY/WfITGaksTJI/AAAAAAAAKsA/ca6yEX-DmOkAFcML3gHuJygkUtYRL6XEQCLcBGAs/s1600/a8.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="633" data-original-width="850" height="297" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IrnkkkKcaRY/WfITGaksTJI/AAAAAAAAKsA/ca6yEX-DmOkAFcML3gHuJygkUtYRL6XEQCLcBGAs/s400/a8.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This is dramatically overstated and in some respects blatantly wrong.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In fact both legitimate and illegitimate advertisements appear alongside pirated content. In fact, the content I have on YouTube that Google has flagged as 'copyrighted' runs alongside ads that pay royalties to the copyright owners - they have chosen to monetize the content rather than demand that I remove it. It's a trade I can live with even though their contribution is sometimes small or nonexistent, and well within the bounds of fair use.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Additionally, many free download sites for movies and music are quite benign and have no malicious advertisements or malware at all. Creative Commons, Internet Archive, Jamendo and even YouTube are quite safe to use. Moreover, the advertisements on legitimate sites - like, say Forbes, which requires that you remove ad-block to see them - can also contain spyware or malware.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Question 9</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oIHYh45CPaw/WfIVXr7md8I/AAAAAAAAKsM/YxEP7TCEwMQ9yq-xKnPjB78TUtPCPD4YQCLcBGAs/s1600/q9.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="635" data-original-width="842" height="301" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oIHYh45CPaw/WfIVXr7md8I/AAAAAAAAKsM/YxEP7TCEwMQ9yq-xKnPjB78TUtPCPD4YQCLcBGAs/s400/q9.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Which Emojis are happy and which emojis are sad? Not that hard to tell: pick out the three smiling enojis. Easy peasy.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I thought it would be more interesting had the question included some more ambiguous emojis, including (say):</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- smiling and laughing with tears</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- skull and crossbones</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- thumbs up</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- wrapped gift</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- smiling pile of poo</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">An opportunity lost, I thought.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AeGq-1b7y0Q/WfIWc34kdkI/AAAAAAAAKsY/GsTnwCi0Tx0APTlEfmfjzaEb0EceWCHogCLcBGAs/s1600/a9.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="634" data-original-width="846" height="298" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AeGq-1b7y0Q/WfIWc34kdkI/AAAAAAAAKsY/GsTnwCi0Tx0APTlEfmfjzaEb0EceWCHogCLcBGAs/s400/a9.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So, yes, I got this question right.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But the answer page struck me as odd. The answer was so obvious it was impossible to get wrong. But the answer page speaks about how emojis can be confusing and misinterpreted, which is exactly the opposite message we get from the question.&nbsp;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Maybe it's because simply sending nothing but an emoji back in response to a birthday party invitation would be vague and confusing in <i>any</i>&nbsp;circumstance. A smile could mean "thanks for the invitation", "yes I will come", or "I'm going to get you" (I had a manager who smiled whenever he thought I was saying something wrong or making a mistake, something I realized only after the fact -&nbsp; talk about confusing).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The better message here is: say what you mean.&nbsp;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Question 10</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-li09sfmAI1c/WfIY33PgnCI/AAAAAAAAKsk/tYAV8mto1xcqNnE2f4WJ3jwLkiag5cl3ACLcBGAs/s1600/q10.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="635" data-original-width="846" height="300" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-li09sfmAI1c/WfIY33PgnCI/AAAAAAAAKsk/tYAV8mto1xcqNnE2f4WJ3jwLkiag5cl3ACLcBGAs/s400/q10.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Again, each dropdown allows all four options, and I've displayed them in the order I selected. I thought of it as a matter of simple probabilities, and as it turned out I was right.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The first and the last are quite obvious. The interesting question for me was regarding the order of the second and third option. I decided as a matter of pure numbers that record producers probably won't see your video. Too many videos, too few producers.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rUNS08qUF9I/WfIY3_0iOSI/AAAAAAAAKso/vo9vZJ8IIXsidfZVivxYTsyu--7s_VPvACEwYBhgL/s1600/a10.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="635" data-original-width="847" height="298" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rUNS08qUF9I/WfIY3_0iOSI/AAAAAAAAKso/vo9vZJ8IIXsidfZVivxYTsyu--7s_VPvACEwYBhgL/s400/a10.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This response suggests the <i>opposite</i>&nbsp;order for the middle two options, however. Whether a video goes viral has nothing to do with whether a record producer sees it. It also doesn't have very much to do with fame (do you remember who uploaded Star Wars boy? the dancing dog? horse attacks alligator? No - the <i>subject</i> of the video may become famous, but the creator often does not).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Whether a video goes viral has everything to do with whether it is shared. No shares, no viral. And in general, the odds of people watching a video are far greater than the odds of people sharing the video. So this response suggests that I should rank 'Your video will get shared' lower than I did.&nbsp;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Comments</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The Alannah and Madeline Foundation is a national charity in Australia committed to protecting children from violence. It was established in memory of Alannah and Madeline Mikac, aged 6 and 3, who, with their mother and 32 others, were killed in a mass shooting at Port Arthur, Tasmania on 28 April 1996. So I have nothing but good things to say about the aims and objectives of the foundation.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I also applaud the objectives of the project, mostly. "children need to be educated on what to do if they are exposed to age-inappropriate content; encounter cyber bullying; or when they might be putting their privacy at risk." Yes. But they <i>also</i>&nbsp;need to be away of other scams and dangers, including misleading advertising, exaggeration of dangers, falsehoods and disingenuous language, racism and stereotyping, and more.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I couldn't examine the resources at all because they're locked behind a paywall (which to me is <i>prima facie</i>&nbsp;evidence that they don't stand on their own merits. The only resource I was able to find was, in my view, riddled with errors and inaccuracies. It seemed to me to be created by a person or people with no direct experience with these topics, but rather by people who were working on the basis of what they had read or been told.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The LSE article links to a bit more information, such as this <a href="https://www.esmart.org.au/news-events/national-esmart-weeks-top-10-cyber-safety-tips/">Top 10 Cyber Safety Tips</a> list which leaves out some really important things. For example, the following appear nowhere:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- a lot of the content you read on the web is false, even if it looks like news content</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- online advertising of often harmful and will track you from site to site, so use ad-blocking software when you browse</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- don't use the same password on every site, and consider using a password manager and/or, for important sites, two-factor authentication</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- games and websites will try to get you to buy credits, coins, lives, etc. - don't fall for it</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- sharing is great, but remember that sharing with one person can result in your having shared with everyone</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">- block users who annoy you, and if they persist, report them to a parent or teacher</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There are more things, but you get the idea. They are principles that encourage an open-eyed realism and healthy caution for all things digital, but not one that exaggerates threats and not one that encourages fear and helplessness.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div>https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/lets-take-digital-license-quiz.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-6405413498018690060Wed, 25 Oct 2017 21:21:00 +00002017-10-25T17:21:17.695-04:00Innovation and Value<i>Responding to George Couros,&nbsp;<a href="https://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/7778">Thinking About Research, Innovation, Test-Scores, and Creativity</a></i><br /><br />You write (and this is the theme of the whole post, really): "One thing I am still adamant about…know the people you serve and move backward from there.&nbsp; That is always your best bet."<br /><br />My experience is that you can't know who you are serving before you begin to serve them, and that there is an inexhaustible and always changing store of knowledge about a person.<br /><br />So I don't try to know people before I serve them. Here's how it works for me:<br /><br />- I bring things to the table - background knowledge, communication skills. a big grey cat sitting on my desk...<br /><br />- People come to me for those things, and we begin.<br /><br />- I experiment, using some of my existing tools, creating new tools, interacting with the person or the audience<br /><br />So how does this related to research and innovation. Well, I think the same stipulations hold.<br /><br />- the whole idea of 'know your customer' or 'know your market' is overrated. I think that you have to bring something to the table. It may or may not serve a previously identified need.<br /><br />- the research and development programme is also iterative. You start, you work back and forth with a potential market, you iterate and you develop creatively<br /><br />Which leads us to what we mean by 'innovation':<br /><br />- innovation is the *outcome* of an interaction with a market, not what leads to it. The idea of some genius working in advance with a pile of research and coming up with an 'innovation' is nonsense<br /><br />- what makes the creative process work, and what makes some development or invention an 'innovation' is the fact that it creates some *benefit* for both the creator and the market (you need both)<br /><br />Which leads to the items in this post:<br /><br />- the only 'evidence' is in the interaction. The 'research literature' (including studies and data etc) are a source for ideas, but serve as 'evidence' only after the fact, as a rationalization<br /><br />- the biases in the research aren't what people think they are - they are biases in the way research is conducted, and of the values served by the research, and not with respect to belief or support in some fact or another<br /><br />- there's another set of 'biases' which aren't really biases, they're errors of reasoning - the confirmation bias, for example (the example you cite is a case of this), and people *can* be free of these errors (though they often don't want to be)<br /><br />- my bias is toward practical application. As they say, 'quality ships'. I won't say I'm always successful in this, but this is were I put my efforts.<br /><br />- what counts as evidence always depends on the context.&nbsp; I don't care about course completion or test grades, for example. I do care about personal empowerment, self actualization, and broader social benefit.<br /><br />I think that most of the research that constitutes 'evidence' for 'evidence-based decision making' is bunk (this includes Hatties stuff - http://www.downes.ca/post/67136 ). It's not real research, but instead a type of busy-work intended to provide the authors with credentials.<br /><br />The types of generalizations we can reach by conducting trials with fixed and mutable variables is extremely limited. Individual variability in cognitive function is far greater than in physical function (and even in fields like medicine, doctors are wary of applying generalizations to specific cases)<br /><br />The best (and most innovative) researchers are not those who master statistical syllogisms, but rather, those who are creative and imaginative, who have strong core skills (pattern recognition, sense of value, contextual awareness, practicality, inference and change processes) and a willingness to engage with the technology, the people, and with other researchers.https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/innovation-and-value.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-3773016153057640636Wed, 25 Oct 2017 16:03:00 +00002017-10-25T12:12:07.667-04:00Reviving the MOOC<i>This article was created as a response to Dhawal Shah in EdSurge on <a href="https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-10-24-a-proposal-to-put-the-m-back-in-moocs">A Proposal to Put the 'M' Back in MOOC</a>. I actually typed the article into the comment form on the article, but it only allows posts from people who are logged into Facebook, which I refuse to do.</i><br /><br />When we created the first MOOC in 2008 the idea was to recreate the concept of the 'course of lectures' from the traditional university.<br /><br />On this model, students are responsible for their own education, often forming communities or societies to collaborate. Professors typically worked one-on-one with students, but from time to time would be enlisted to offer a series - or 'course' - of lectures on a given topic. The lectures could be (and often were) public, and were frequently attended by other professors in the same field.<br /><br />The purpose of these lectures wasn't to serve up content for the students to remember. It was to give them food for thought, which they would take back to their own communities and debate. Students would bring in additional resources, contribute to the discussions, and over time, develop their own thoughts and theses (which they would eventually publish, and this thesis would be the basis for their examination and graduation).<br /><br />When we set up our MOOC, it was set up as a series of discussions with guest lecturers. George and I (and sometimes Dave) would facilitate the discussion, converse with the guest, sometimes invite participants to converse, and later in the same week, would offer up our own thoughts on the topic. There was no prepared curriculum (other than the list of topics each guest would cover). It was all 'in the moment', which is what made it exciting and engaging.<br /><br />The single best extension of the model, in my mind (and one which we never successfully emulated) was the 'assignment bank' from Jim Groom's DS106 (also supported by Alan Levine and Grant Potter). The idea was that students would create relevant activities (usually some form of digital storytelling) as 'assignments' and upload the description to the assignment bank; students in the course would then complete the assignment and upload the results somewhere and share the URL with DS106 participants. That's where my 'LetsMakeSomeArtDammit' blog came from.<br /><br />The xMOOCs which followed (Stanford AI, EdX, etc) took some of the concepts we had developed, along with the name 'MOOC', and broke the model. They broke it in several ways:<br /><br />- they depended mostly on pre-recorded videos for content (following the Khan Academy) model. This was content that was intended to be 'learned' by students.<br /><br />- they dispensed pretty much entirely with the community or society model of learning, and eliminated almost completely the self-management by learners in the course<br /><br />- the assignments were created centrally and became the means of assessment in the course<br /><br />- they commercialized and monetized the course (as opposed to the education) which meant that progressively less and less of the course experience was freely accessible.<br /><br />I think that universities (especially the 'elite' universities) have lost the plot when it comes to their value proposition (or, at least, what they tell the world their value proposition is). They are not (and never have been) selling 'courses'. It's not even clear that they have been selling 'degrees' (though many would say that's what they're buying from the universities).<br /><br />They're selling two things:<br /><br />- access to the top researchers in the field. This access isn 't a 'teaching' presence, it's access to the model and examples of the thinking and work undertaken by these researchers, and in the more elite universities, one-on-one access to the researcher him or her self.<br /><br />- access to a community of like-minded individuals organizing their studies around the scholars assembled at the university<br /><br />The outcome of this model is not necessarily a degree or certificate (though recognition by these same scholars that you've successfully defended your thesis is certainly of value and would automatically open doors for you at the same or other institutions, as well as in government and private industry).<br /><br />The outcome is a deep and current education in a topic, a track record of some relevant contributions to that field, and association with a community that will continue to support its members and their work into the various professions.<br /><br />Note that none of these are offered by the xMOOC. And note that they are (to more or less a degree) exactly what our MOOCs provided. We (had we ever been given the opportunity) would have created the business proposition very differently.<br /><br />- participating institutions pay for the MOOC, and in particular, the technical infrastructure and the time it takes for researchers to participate (note that this is contingent on the professors actually being researchers)(also note that there are no 'levels of instruction' - the 'levels' are determined through the organization of the community or the society, not the teaching of the course)(by 'participating institutions' I mean not only universities but also governments and industries who see value in this particular line of enquiry).<br /><br />- the university and the professor offer access to one-on-one (and possible small circle) consultations for a fee such that these fees offset the cost of the salary and support for the MOOC (this is a model that can be refined in numerous ways, from the very good (professors organizing themselves into self-managing cooperatives, which were the basis for traditional universities) to the very bad (an Uber of professors) - we have to be careful how we structure this.<br /><br />- for lower fees, the universities offer facilitation for students communities and societies - these would be offered by higher level students and would include tutorial sessions and other activities to help lower-level students participate more fully in the courses<br /><br />- while fees could be charged directly for access to professors, the more common (and preferred) model would be via sponsorship (by employers, by governments, etc.) and student participation would often occur alongside employment, internship or apprenticeship in some profession or discipline<br /><br />The model I'm describing is based on the growth and development of the individual, rather than the idea of stuffing them full of facts. It is based on the idea that education is a cultural and social activity as well as a cognitive activity. It is a model that creates value for the participant immediately, rather than deferring that value to the conclusion of a very long and expensive process. And evaluation is based on actual contributions to the community, rather than through testing or some other sort of game.<br /><br />If I were ever given the opportunity to manage an institution's online program, this model is more or less what I would do.https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/reviving-mooc.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-5124970203787816153Fri, 20 Oct 2017 20:43:00 +00002017-10-20T16:43:46.479-04:00Working Memory and Object PermanenceThis is pretty speculative, but it makes sense to me and I'd like to get the idea own on (digital) paper in case I don't get the chance to come back to it.<br /><br />It is well known that we have different types of memory: working memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Sometimes the first two are thought of as the same; I've also seen writers distinguish between the two. It won't matter for the purposes of this particular item.<br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory">According</a> to Wikipedia, working memory is "a cognitive system with a limited capacity that is responsible for temporarily holding information available for processing." The purpose of working memory is to support "reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior."<br /><br />This theory is based on an information-processing view of cognition and memory. On this picture, working memory is like a 'buffer' where operations can be conducted and where data can be temporarily stored until we decide whether it is relevant.<br /><br />The theory of short-term memory is core to cognitive load theory. <a href="http://www.ifets.info/journals/20_4/13.pdf">Here's a summary</a> I read today (consistent with previous accounts I've seen, and which motivated the current post):<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Long-term memory acts as an information repository or archive. This archive is organized by structures called schema, which are essentially series of interconnected mental models (Sweller, 2005). However, neither of these structures process new information. New information is processed through the working memory, which can only handle a finite amount of information at once...</blockquote>We're familiar with this concept of cognitive load. It's based on <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0043158">George A. Miller's paper</a>&nbsp;on the "magical number" of 7 (plus or minus two). "The unaided observer is severely limited in terms of the amount of information he can receive, process, and remember."<br /><br />I've never really been satisfied with that account. It doesn't seem like a very efficient mechanism. It seems to rely far too much on what would need to be a pre-programmed cognitive structure. And my own working memory doesn't seem subject to the same sort of limitations; for example, I commonly keep 9-digit ID numbers or 10-digit phone numbers within easy short-term access. I can remember much longer sequences of letters. Am I some sort of genius?<br /><br />Well, no. What I'm good at is chunking. Miller <a href="http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/psy430s2001/Miller%20GA%20Magical%20Seven%20Psych%20Review%201955.pdf">explains</a>,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">We must recognize the importance of grouping or organizing the input sequence into units or chunks. Since the memory span is a fixed number of chunks, we can increase the number of bits of information that it contains simply by building larger and larger chunks.</blockquote>That sounds fine, but it suggests that the mechanisms underlying working memory are a lot more complex than the buffer analogy suggests. The buffer is for raw unprocessed input, but our working memory seems to be working with things that are already pre-processed. So there's something wrong with the buffer model.<br /><br />There's another problem. Earlier this year I saw a number of references to work showing that working memory doesn't act as a buffer at all. As the title of <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/long-term-memories-aren-t-just-short-term-memories-transferred-into-storage">this item</a> says, long-term memories aren't just short-term memories transferred into storage. Or as <a href="http://neurosciencenews.com/memory-consolidation-hippocampus-6360/">summarized</a>,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Traditional theories of consolidation may not be accurate, because memories are formed rapidly and simultaneously in the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus on the day of training. “They’re formed in parallel but then they go different ways from there. The prefrontal cortex becomes stronger and the hippocampus becomes weaker,” Morrissey says.</blockquote>Now the effect of both of theser things - the pre-processing of working memory, and the parallel creation of working memory and long-term memory - suggest that the application of cognitive-load theory in education is mistaken. The suggestion is that the limitations of working memory <a href="http://www.ifets.info/journals/20_4/13.pdf">mean that</a>&nbsp; "poorly designed instructional sequences can... cause learners to exert more mental effort to learn the material than should have been required." But if working memory doesn't play a key bottleneck role in learning and memory, the impact of poorly-designed educational material seems to be lessened.<br /><br />That has been my thinking for a while now. But I am left working why we have working memory at all. We do have this parallel and very limited type of memory. Why?<br /><br />Here is where I begin speculating in earnest.<br /><br /><i>Visual</i>&nbsp;processing is parallel and (mostly) non-linear. We receive inputs through the eyes; these are pre-processed through&nbsp; few neural layers in the retina and then sent as a lattice to the visual cortex. Through several more layers of neural network processing, the undifferentiated input is recognized as patterns, clusters and objects. This diagram from <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00124/full">a paper on object recognition</a> is a representation of that process:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/34845/fpsyg-04-00124-HTML/image_m/fpsyg-04-00124-g001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="728" data-original-width="686" height="320" src="https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/34845/fpsyg-04-00124-HTML/image_m/fpsyg-04-00124-g001.jpg" width="301" /></a></div><br /><br /><br />What's worth noting that the bottom layer of this network - where it says 'Retina/LGN filtered input' is essentially a plot of physical space where the x and y axes corresponds to length and width (<a href="http://slideplayer.com/slide/8339765/">technically</a>, it's a 'two and a half dimension' sketch, and some other visual properties, but the main point here is that it is physical space).<br /><br />But what about persistence across time? All of our senses operate synchronously. That is, we perceive events <i>when they happen</i>, not before or after they happen. What we see is what is happening in front of us <i>now</i>. What we hear, smell, touch... same thing. So how do we distinguish between something that is fleeting and ephemeral and something that is (more or less) object-permanent?<br /><br />Enter working memory. It works exactly the same as visual perception, except that the inputs are different. The x and y axes no longer correspond to physical dimensions. Instead, one of these axes is <i>time</i>, while the other is <i>objects</i>&nbsp;(where we can think of 'objects' as roughly equivalent to the (mis-named) 'semantic properties' that are the outcome of visual processing.<br /><br />How do we get an input dimension that corresponds to time? I can think of several mechanisms - we might loop through the y-dimension of the input layer in sequence, so each degree would represent a different point in time. Or the values of the input neurons might decay at different rates, so that each neuron would represent a different instant in time. Whatever. The main point is: <i>we perceive objects in time in the same way we perceive objects in space</i>. And what we are (mistakenly) calling 'working memory' just is that perceptual process.<br /><br />It stands to reason that working memory would be limited in just the way that visual or audio perception are limited. We can only perceive certain intervals of time, and we can only perceive a limited quantity of objects in that time. Hence, working memory appears to be short term and limited in scope. There's no reason why it couldn't be extended in both dimensions; it is subject to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity">plasticity</a> just as is any other area. But this would be an exceptional case, rather than the norm.<br /><br />If my speculations are indeed accurate, we should be able to predict that the limitations of working memory (as we continue to call it until someone comes up with a better name) would apply to <i>linear processes</i>&nbsp;that take place over time, and especially tasks involving remembering sequences, language or reasoning. And we could predict that cognitive load isn't really a measure of the number of objects we are presented, but the length of time it takes to present the objects.<br /><br />Anyhow, all this is - like I say - speculative. I have't seen anything like this in the literature anywhere, but if there's anything to this, it will not doubt have been discovered by now, and I'm just unaware of it. There may be a whole discipline devoted to it. Maybe people who have read this far can find related literature, or let me know where my thinking is wrong.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/working-memory-and-object-permanence.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-5434885963360572176Wed, 18 Oct 2017 15:32:00 +00002017-10-18T11:35:10.787-04:00The Future of Learning Management Systems: Development, Innovation and Change<br /><h3>Phil Hill</h3><div><i>Summary notes from the presentation at&nbsp;</i>from&nbsp;at&nbsp;the&nbsp;<a data-cke-saved-href="http://onlinelearning2017.ca/en/" href="http://onlinelearning2017.ca/en/">World Conference on Online Learning</a>, Toronto.</div><div><br /></div>Slides: <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/PhilHill3/hill-slides-world-congress-session-20171018/1">https://www.slideshare.net/PhilHill3/hill-slides-world-congress-session-20171018/1</a><br /><br />We forget about the perspective of time. Let’s look at 2011-2017. Thrun was saying (2012) 50 years from now there will only be ten institutions delivering higher education. This was the perfect example of hype not helping the industry. A lot of the time there’s too much talk about ‘it’s been this way the last 20 years’ or ‘the future is going to change dramatically’.<br /><br />There are lot of new technology developments in ed tech but a lot of business plans come straight out of South Park. Course completion rates are a problem, also student authentication. A lot of barriers had to be overcome for the commercial MOOCs to do what they were saying.<br /><br />Meanwhile in the U.S. - existing schools and a lot of the more conservative partners really are making progress. 30 percent of student shave taken an online class. In Canada, similar, 12-16% of post-secondary students taking an online course for credit. The ‘department of academic technology’ used to me off playing in the corner. But now they’re loose in the house.<br /><br />There has been this artificial dilemma: is online as good as face-to-face? But there isn’t a systemic way to evaluate what works. But there are studies: <a href="http://www.learninghouse.com/ocs2017">http://www.learninghouse.com/ocs2017</a> vast majority of students said online was better or just as good.<br /><br />A lot of the focus on what’s needed is captured by quotes about async and individualized nature of online learning. Students can control pace and own learning styles. Software that provides instant feedback could be effective in improving course performance. These point to what LMSs are trying to address, and should address - things that could not be done the same way in face-to-face.<br /><br />So to give a view of the direction where the industry should be going: an example about the habitable worlds course, <a href="http://e-literate.tv/s3-e31">http://e-literate.tv/s3-e31</a> - they created a course to illustrate the thought processes of science. The course was a problem-solving course - calculate the probability of life around different stars. It gets into various parts of science. They had tools for interaction, etc.<br /><br />The challenge is, how can systems support this, esp. the learning management system. This course was not developed using a standard LMS - an LMS couldn’t support such a course. But they’re moving in this direction. We’re in an inflection point, where we have mainstream adoption, different platform designs, and moving beyond digitizing the traditional classroom. And it’s not just the LMS: there are adaptive learning platforms, game-based learning platforms, competency-based learning platforms, personalized learning-learner focused challenges.<br /><br />So, first: platforms matter. Everyone’s got an LMS but people aren’t proud of that (it’s like minivan ownership). When they first get an LMS there’s a reason for it. It’s solving a particular need. But over time the LMS companies began adding features, sometimes of questionable value. And the core design of the LMS is based on an old model. They used to be known as course management systems. That’s a more accurate description. Learners are just a list of entities that belong to a course.<br /><br />But now we’re in a world where it’s much more important to focus on the learner, even to what they’re doing outside the course. But these are features that are ‘bolted on’. Feldstein’s law: over time any ed tech application adds features and looks like a poorly designed LMS.<br /><br />Also, when LMSs were initially designed, they were the only app out there with any kind of scale. There weren’t that many that could be used in the classroom. Today, it’s completely different. There are tons of applications that could be used in the classroom. There’s a demand from faculty and designers to take advantage of these tools they use in their personal lives. And they create an expectation that ‘my system should be as easy to use’. There’s so much intense frustration with the LMS. They keep saying ‘why is this so hard to use?’ Not just usability - there’s also ‘why does it go down?’<br /><br />Also, over time, if you look at the LMSs that can serve an entire institution, there have been a lot of attempts by other systems to enter that mainstream. First there was the open source movement (Moodle and Sakai). Now these are in the mainstream - Moodle is the most used LMS in the world. In the early 2010s we see entrants like Canvas, which is not the fastest growing LMS in North America and Europe. And there has been a number of others people thought would enter the mainstream but haven’t - LoudCloud, OpenClasss, etc. Most recently Schoology, from K-12 and trying to get into higher ed. This is a very static market. There is not a large number of new entrants that have staying power. Google classroom is a very recent engtrant.<br /><br />If we look at the data: new implementations are increasingly externally hosted (ie., hosted in the cloud) - it’s a lot slower outside the US and Canada but it’s growing substantially. Some systems, like Canvas, that’s the only choice. But all systems are moving toward that model. A huge part of this is to deal with the frustration of systems going down during exam week or first week of classes. The solution is to get into cloud hosting where it can scale quickly.<br /><br />Another trend - maybe not the way it should be, but it’s where the data point: open source peaked in 2013 at about 34% and since then it has begun to drop. It’s funny with all the talk about open education, the licensing model of the LMS is not going in that direction. And it’s not just North America - it peaked much higher outside North America, but even there we’re detecting a drop. (Discussion: people perceive Moodle and Sakai as not as professional-looking and easy to use. Also, the drivers aren’t there - when Blackboard was acquiring everything, schools said they wanted to control their own destiny). &nbsp;But given all that, Moodle is very much the most popular system (except in North America, where it’s roughly equal to Blackboard).<br /><br />But - in all the regions - the vast majority of LMS activity is coming down to just a few vendors. What does that mean, when they’re all looking at only the same handful of LMSs?<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K4_brNC9lgg/Wed0oHxlrpI/AAAAAAAAKo8/HyXmwd2INUMNnyvKNNSOKLMPZZay1mBAACLcBGAs/s1600/walled%2Bgarden.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="865" data-original-width="1600" height="216" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K4_brNC9lgg/Wed0oHxlrpI/AAAAAAAAKo8/HyXmwd2INUMNnyvKNNSOKLMPZZay1mBAACLcBGAs/s400/walled%2Bgarden.PNG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br />(Discussion - aren’t these purchasing decisions made by IT departments? Response - well, it should be driven by academics. But you need both. In a healthy decision there’s a balance there. But in reality, the majority have probably been driven by IT. Comment: some IT people focus on security and privacy. Response: it’s part of the reason Europe has been more reluctant to embrace cloud hosting (especially US-based cloud hosting. But these are being addressed - eg., AWS has hosting centres in Europe).<br /><br />How do you resolve the issue where there’s more and more ed tech out there, yet at the same time universities and colleges view the LMS as the most important asset. A lot of people have argued that the LMS is going away. But the data doesn’t back that up.<br /><br />That’s gets to the idea of the LMS as a walled garden. They were initially designed that way; nothing gets in or out. For a lot of online programs, this was a point of pride (eg., esp. eCollege). But over time you started getting external toold students and faculty wanted to use - esp. social networks and blogging. LMSs would create a really poor version of the tool inside the walled garden. But it wasn’t just those two - there’s video, collaboration tools, wikis- and these created feature bloat in the LMS: they had a lot of tools, but they were just poor imitations of what was available on the outside.<br /><br />What we’re seeing now is more of a breakdown of the walled garden. The purpose of the LMS is to provide the basics, and make sure there’s a way to provide a pathway to the external systems (eg. LTI integration). A lot of this was enabled by learning Tools Interoperability (LTI). LTI isn’t perfect - too much focus on passing rosters and grades. It takes forever to get top the next generation. But schools are saying that the LMS is still central, but should enable the use of third party tools. So it’s the idea of LMS as a portal (without having to sign into five different systems). Beyond LTI there are other standards - xAPI, Caliper, etc.<br /><br />The three biggest trends:<br /><br /><ul></ul><br /><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br /><br /><br /><li>cloud hosting</li><br /><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br /><br /><br /><li>less cluttered &amp; intuitive design</li><br /><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br /><br /><br /><li>make it easier to integrate into 3rd party applications</li><br /><br /><br />These are done differently in different systems.<br /><br />Where I don’t see this happening is in competency-based systems. They’re sticking pretty much to the walled garden model.<br /><br />Referent to EDUCAUSE ‘Next Generation Digital Learning Environment’.<br /><br />(Comment: has there been less feature bloat? Across the industry there has been improved usability and less feature bloat. But a bigger movement is the success of Canvas, which came out of the gate with a more minimal product. And also the competition is driven by D2L with their Daylight user experience.)<br /><br />(Cisco has done the slickest job of integrating the tools within a single platfrom. I wish education ould follow the model There’s a big more by LMS vendors to work with Office365 and Drive from a file sharing perspective, but not nearly as much in collaboration.)<br /><br />A big long-term trend to watch: initially there was a lot of emphasis on analytics, where they say ‘we will analyze the data’. Now it’s just ‘give us the data’ so whoever owns the students can do their own research. The big thing is data access; analytics is more secondary. The institution owns the data (should own the data)? The challenge is to get it out.https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-future-of-learning-management.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-2012696892880424096Wed, 18 Oct 2017 14:12:00 +00002017-10-18T10:12:26.474-04:00WCOL Opening plenary - WednesdayI missed the first talk: I have put in some tweets. A full summary of the last two talks is below.<br /><br /><h3>Phil Hill and Fiona Hollands<br /><em>Tomorrow’s Learning Platform</em></h3><br />Patrice Torcivia‏ @Profpatrice&nbsp; First up @PhilOnEdTech discussing the 'regular and substantive interaction'<br /><br />Lynn Sutherland‏ @GrokIam&nbsp; Online Learning is now #Mainstream @PhilOnEdTech and will become even more personalized<br /><br />Elaine Lam‏ @ElaineKLam&nbsp; ‘#edtech decision makers live in an echo chamber. There r other great ideas out there that live outside #highered’<br /><br />Chris Anstead Breaking open filter bubbles &amp; silos of online learning spaces! Making new global connections &amp; ways of knowing<br /><br />Janine Lim‏ @outonalim @EdResearcher asks for the for-profits in the room. None. Where are they? Too much focus on OPEN at this conference? Curious.<br /><br />Janine Lim‏ @outonalim&nbsp; edtech decision makers don't usually look for research to choose, instead local evidence - @EdResearcher Fiona Hollands<br /><br />Angela van Barneveld‏ @avanbarn Tool-first approach to tech integration labelled ‘Garbage Can Model’ - yep! Fiona Hollands plenary(ColumbiaU)<br /><br />Jacqueline‏ @JacquelineH_11&nbsp; My notes on day 3's opening plenary- great speakers today!&nbsp; <a href="https://twitter.com/JacquelineH_11/status/920643009775112194">https://twitter.com/JacquelineH_11/status/920643009775112194</a><br /><br /><br /><h3>Randy Best<br /><em>Perspectives on Innovative Learning</em></h3>We are an industry in transition - transition to what? Whatever it is, it will be technology enabled. There will be a broad array of different types of alternative degree programs and different products. These will leverage technology and take advantage of recent advances. 21stt century consumers are demanding more choice.<br /><br />My view of online higher ed has been an attempt to reproduce the higher ed classroom in tech. The next generation will be designed specifically for digital delivery, and break down how we study into a less linear market. These products are already here. Today, more students are in alternative degree programs than attend traditional campuses. Eg. Harvard and KIT 1.3 million enrollments in a shorted masters program at a discounted price.<br /><br />The trend toward different types of programs, different types of products, is accelerating, and will be soon accepted. Soon students won’t need to borrow to go to college. The scale will more than offset the lower price. The new 21st century consumer of higher ed has choices.<br /><br />The trend in the US is millions of people returning to university for higher level skills and credentials. Without these returning students enrollment in our colleges would be down almost 20%. This is a reservoir of about 100 million potential students.<br /><br /><h3>Simon Nelson<br /><em>Digital Transformation and the New Pedagogy for Online Learning (FutureLearn)</em></h3>I was with the BBC; it was just embracing digital and people were predicting television would disappear. But today BBC1 is still the most-watched channel. But there has still been a significant more to digital. And the change has come, surprisingly, from content. Eg. Netflix content.<br /><br />It was about 5 years I heard the word MOOC. I was invited to run a ‘secret project’ at the Open University. We saw massive hype of MOOCs and an almost equally ridiculous dismissal of the model. Think of the pace that it swept through education. So, this industry can move fast, and is doing so.<br /><br />But as an industry it has a huge way to exploit technology for its customers, the learners. And I was fortunate to launch the startup, FutureLearn, drawing on generous funding and expertise. We are a commercial subsidiary, separate from OU. So I brought in outsiders. By now we were a couple of years late, so we needed to do something different.<br /><br />We decided to build our own platform. Existing platforms didn’t seem like an option. We were amazed at how good learning experience didn’t seem to be a major fact in existing platforms. Our principles were:<br /><br /><br /><li>it has to run perfectly on mobile most platforms, home page worked, learning experience broke</li><br /><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br /><br /><li>what we did had to look great; most platforms are as much fun as a tax return (showing examples, eg. Intro to CyberSecurity)</li><br /><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br /><br /><li>high quality content eg. Cory Doctorow introducing the course</li><br /><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br /><br /><li>it has to be social we saw lots fetishizing the pumping of video through the web - so with us, at every step of what you do, you can join a conversation</li><br /><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br /><br /><li>the courses have to be credible delivered by the world’s greatest universities, but also with meaningful outcomes - eg full masters degree</li><br /><br />We’re still looking for partners, we have one of the best platforms in the world. We still don’t have any Canadian partners; looking to change that. We want to bundle credentials together to reform what learning can be. What’s going on in classrooms today won’t be fit for purpose for what’s coming in the future.<br /><br />We are starting to generate significant revenue from this. We are going to have a good position in the market. And we will be opening free education to millions of people.<br /><br /><h3>Comments</h3>Question - for Phil Hill: What is your take on the ‘death of the LMS’? Response: I will cover in my presentation. I’ve herd this, but it doesn’t get backed up by evidence. Eg. We don’t see the percentage of schools with an LMS dropping at all.<br /><br />Question for Simon &nbsp;- how do you make your money? OU - first, from learners, you need to upgrade to access a certificate, also some content. We’re starting to offer full degrees. We take a share of thata revenue. On the business side, our partners pay a fee in order to use the platform. Also now bidding on government tenders, eg., to deliver specific courses.<br /><br />Question - what aare the lessons FutureLearn has learned about completion rates? Response - about 1/4 of the people who start do the majority, about 20 percent complete the course. The trick is to get people to start; a lot of people sign up and then drift away. We send them email and prompts to get them to start. We have found the social element absolutely critical.<br /><br />Question - for Fiona - how do you justify involvement of students in decisions? Response - students are the end user, the primary customer in education. It’s not just to make things easier for them but to help them learn and prepare for the future. Phil - it’s difficult to get students and get organized input. With students focus groups just don’t work. You need more of a town-hall type approach. And a lot of schools are scared to involve students.<br /><br />Question - will digital make academic corruption greater or less? Response - MIT found students were signing up twice in the same MOOC - people would get all the answers in the first run, then get perfect scores in the second. Phil- part of the thing with digital is that it can scale, so when you have a creative method of chesting, it can happen quicker. And people can be quite novel with cheating.<br /><br />Question - shared experience as recipient of Telus’s online learning - I have to do a mandatory integrity course, and other courses. There’s a huge compliance factor. Courses are totally online.<br /><br />Question - how do you reconcile what FutureLearn does with what MOOCs started to do, to make education free. Response - team could make far more in private sector. Want to create impact. But we are convinced that it must be commercially sustainable. It must receive a return to be able to do this. So it comes down in the end to satisfying customer experience. We are big believers in premium, upselling high value products. Fiona - I suspect that a lot of the people buying credentials are looking for the credentials, not to learn, and I’m not sure the public should be paying for that.https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/wcol-opening-plenary-wednesday.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-558946100581196712Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:39:00 +00002017-10-17T15:39:32.816-04:00Exploring the Potential: Innovating Uses of Technology in Teaching and Learning<h3>Don McIntosh<br /><em>An Old Curmudgeon’s View of Technology in Education</em></h3>I put together a director of vendors of online learning products and services - more than 2000 products there, including hundreds of LMSs. It’s on teachonline.ca<br /><br />I’m inspired by the people at this conference - I don’t want to rain on the parade, but I want to share some pet peeves. For context: I believe that online learning can be better than classrooms. There’s a myth about interactivity in a classroom setting. In a class of 30 people, 5 people are interacting. 15 are tuned out entirely.<br /><br />Let me try a survey with you: <a href="http://www.getfeedback.com/r/VkVXyNK7/">http://www.getfeedback.com/r/VkVXyNK7/</a><br />Educational breakthroughs?<br /><ul><li>When I see educational breakthroughs of quantum leap, my crap detectors go up. The reality is that education is a slowmoving institution. We learn by doing, as we’ve always known - but are afraid top practice this.</li></ul>Education trends seem to go in 15-year cycles. The ideas come back, but with new names. Problem-based learning, competency based learning, etc.<br /><br />OK, to the technologies:<br /><br />Video: we have things like YouTube, Khan, TED Talks, etc. But they’re still mostly just lectures. I hate seeing a video with information I could read in ten seconds. Video is best used for feedback, demonstrating skills, cat videos and pratfalls.<br /><br />MOOCs: I have mixed feelings about that. 10 years ago they were exciting. They were about the democratization of education. We haven’t reached that goal yet. Corporate universities and MOOCs? Marketing nonsense.<br /><br />Adaptive/personalized learning. There’s promise here, but the words are used without meaning. Personalization is what Amazon does. Adaptive learning also focuses on what people need, not just what they want. There are questions of privacy.<br /><br />LMSs: do they improve learning? No. they are simply an administrative tool.<br /><br />Faculty development: sadly, it hasn’t taken hold. Very few faculty have adopted the idea of teaching and learning - they’re rewarded for their research.<br /><br /><br /><h3>Gerhard Trippen<br /><em>UTORMAT: University of Toronto Mathematical Assessment Tool</em></h3>This is an online assignment automarker with multi-part randomized algorithmic questions.<br />I wanted to design a tool for myself, and I want a tool that would allow everyone to develop questions for themselves. It’s about one or two years old.<br /><br />I needed questions with multiple parts. Eg. Here is the circle. (a) calculate the diameter. (b) calculate the circumference. Etc.<br /><br />Motivations: make it free for everyone, and fully online. First attempt was a Python script with a lot of back and forth. Various types of questions. Has automated marking with partial marks (even if you get part (a) wrong, maybe you got the rest right). There’s also an interactive mode with hints/videos.<br /><br /><br /><h3>Dave Lane<br /><em>OERu’s ‘Loosely Coupled’ Tech Platfrom</em></h3>Two ways to develop a platform:<br /><ul><li>Monolithic created by an individual designer - great beauty but great fragility. Everything happens in a single product. Eg. The LMS. They tend to be VC funded and tend to be done at great risk. They are profit-motive and based on a ‘lock-in’ model to keep you there. They have well-integrated parts, but tend not to be best-of-breed for various components.</li><li>Cathedral loosely coupled components - chaotic at the surface - vibrabt thriving marketplace. The system works because it adheres to a set of simple rules. This is what usually emerges after the initial forays into a development domain, as standards emerge which allow loosely integrated components to talk to each other. This is also the place where free and open source software (FOSS) can emerge.</li></ul>FOSS - four essential freedoms: use, share, study, improve.<br /><br />OERu uses FOSS because we believe learning should be done in such a way as to preserve these values. We can identify software that will fulfil a niche within out ecosystem without any up front costs. We can very rapidly, and in very small increments, improve our system. Our learning environment is the broader internet.<br /><br />We support learner freedom: they never have to log in or enter a password to access our materials. No learner should have to sacrifice their own freedom, privacy, or their own future access to their own created works. We want people beyond our institution to make use of these tools, and share. See <a href="http://tech.oeru.org/">http://tech.oeru.org</a> And we want to promote self-reliance.<br /><br />This talk: <a href="http://oer.nz/icde17">http://oer.nz/icde17</a> and <a href="http://oer.nz/tech">http://oer.nz/tech</a><br /><br /><h3>Pernille Stenkil Hansen<br /><em>Using Padlet for Active Teaching and Learning in Higher Education</em></h3>See: <a href="https://padlet.com/pha/ICDE2017">https://padlet.com/pha/ICDE2017</a><br />This application is very popular as a backchannel in our courses. Some examples:<br /><ul><li>preClass Padlets questions to consider, key points to an article</li><li>inClass Padlets discussions, brainstorming, backchannel, questions</li><li>postClass for peer review, post resources, or reflect on learning</li></ul>Example: Anders Klitmoller, Philosophy of Science class.<br /><h3><br />Discussion</h3>Question. <em>UTORMAT</em> - is it free for my students? Or just yours? Response: it was funded by U f T. But it’s not open source at the moment.<br /><br />Question: About OERu tools. Response: about OERu harvester.<br /><br />Question: do you have a ‘top 10’ tools?<br /><br />Question: security for open source tools. Response: open source more secure than non-open source.<br /><br />Question: how to engage faculty? Response: that’s a question I’ve wrestled with for decades. But I think it’s an individual thing. The problem is the reward system - faculty are rewarded for doing research. That hasn’t changed in 40 years.https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/exploring-potential-innovating-uses-of.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-1317555231744309121Tue, 17 Oct 2017 18:39:00 +00002017-10-17T14:39:00.992-04:00The Future Isn't What It Used To Be<h3>John Daniel<br /><em>Open Education in a Closing World</em></h3>The end of WWII marked the emergence of a new world order maked by the universal declaration of human rights. By the end of the 20th century they were more deeply embedded than ever. But today this consensus is breaking down in ‘the post-truth era’. And post-truth societies tend to become post-trust societies. But the success of nations depends directly on the trust of people in each other and their institutions.<br /><br />The turbulence reflects a loss of belief in progress, but education is founded on a belief in progress. Across the world there is cause for hope. Eg. Johann Norberg. The trends are consistently positive. How can education contribute, and what is the role of open education in this process?<br /><br />First, we need to see that the left-right political spectrum has shifted to one between open and closed. Second, we want people to find their place on the continuum between inclusiveness and exclusiveness; create societies that are deliberately diverse, and exploit this diversity to create trust.<br /><br />Ole Peter Otterson: the lack of confidence in academia is a great challenge. Universities have to establish a respect for truth, and create arenas for debate, including aa voice for those left behind. Universities should be trust-building as well as truth-seeking.<br /><br />Nothing is more responsible for ‘the good old days’ than a bad memory. People should graduate with an understanding of the broad sweep of history. As well, the fundamental driver of progress has always been education. So higher education should challenge students to position themselves on the spectrum between open and closed.<br /><br />Lester Pearson: how can there be peace without people understanding each other, and how can they understand each other if they don’t get to know each other. (Plug for UWC program)<br /><br />How can education help students position themselves on these continua? First, recruit diverse students, and exploit that diversity. Second, less teaching, and more debate. Graduates should leave with an ingrained attitude of systematic skepticism. All this can be done online.<br /><br />Truth, trust and knowledge are the foundations of successful societies, which means less didactic teaching and more debating between students. We can aspire to OU’s slogan: open to people, places, methods and ideas.<br /><br /><h4>Michael Rostek<br /><em>Making Sense of the Future of Post-Secondary Education</em></h4>Or: confessions of a failed foresight practitioner.<br />This is a summary of a recent project.<br /><br />Why foresight? It’s gard to predict the future accurately. The future can’t be predicted - this is about understanding. We create the future; the decisions we make will lead down a path. Post-Secondary education is not a simple topic. So I’m up to pro-active adaptation to this environment.<br /><br />In the PSE environment there have been studies, eg. Conference Board fo Canada 2016. It says Canada’s performance is slipping in PSE.<br /><br />What is strategic foresight. It’s not scenarios, it is not prediction. It’s the ability to see developments before they become trends, to recognize patterns before they emerge, and grasp the fatures of social currents likely to have an impact (Rohrbeck &amp; Schwartz). There are various foresignt processes, exg. Oxford, JISC, etc.<br /><br />The process: exploring the external world. The contextual environment is where you have no impact, the transactional environment is where you have impact, and then your organizational environment is internal. Contextual includes: geo-political, energy prices, social values, etc.<br /><br />At UOIT we had some successes, some future 20-year looks. We brought in a diverse group of professionals to determine where we are going.<br /><br />Eg. The future of mental health and wellness. It was a success because we paired it with online learning, a mini-MOOC.<br /><br />Jeff De Cagna: the board’s duty of foresight. They have a duty to develop a clear-eyed look at the future.<br /><br /><h4>Fred de Vries and Mark Brown<br /><em>Wicked Scenarios for the Future: Developing Strategic Leadership for New Times</em></h4>(Fred de Vries presenting). The big question is: how to translate those development to your own institution. The key could be the people who are not leaders yet, the ones preparing for the posts where they really are in charge. So we set up an online leadership academy (EOLLA). The point is, let’s focus on the professional development of ourselves.<br /><br />Three assumptions:<br /><ul><li>The job of the leader is to grow more leaders. This only works in an institute where the leader gives his people room to grow.</li><li>We don’t need people who are lone rangers we need leaders who can connect</li><li>Developing and implementing desired change is not an event, but an ongoing process.</li></ul>We had a workshop (old-fashioned but looking in the eye is good). We looked at what are the major changes, what are the uncertainties? Different business models, different courses: create scenarios. The new ask what the preferred future scenario is for the institution (from well-known scenarios). Then, the transformation process.<br /><br /><h3>Adnan Qayyum<br /><em>Vhallenges and opportunities for Open and Distance Education in 12 Countries</em></h3>Not so much research at the macro-level of open and distance learning. So we wanted to look at what ODE is doing in various countries. Rory McGreal: ODE was the ugly duckling, now it’s the belle of the ball. (Plug for a couple of books)<br /><br />Some of the major challenges we saw:<br /><br />Growth - actual enrolment numbers are increasing. Percentages range from 7 to 50% in ODE. But the quality of statistics varies across countries. In Russia, nearly half the population is involved with ODE, while in Germany it’s as low as 6%. Growth varies: in some countries is consistent, in others it’s rapid, in others fluctuating or even in design.<br /><br />Competition is also increasing. There are more providers, eg. Residential institutions. There’s a large number of private sector offerings. Eg. In Brazil, the entire growth in ODE is private sector.<br /><br />Note that online and distance education are not the same thing. Online education is accepted in Russia, for example, but correspondence education isn’t.<br /><br />Private good vs public good: in Europe, higher education is a public good (exception: UK). In other countries, it’s a private good. If you benefit, you pay. But online education is becoming a vehicle for the idea of education as a private good.<br /><br />Opportunities: ODE leads innovation in improvements in time-to-completion and cost-to-completion (eg., credit transfers, funding).<br /><br /><h2>Comments</h2>Question: diminishment of faculty role in education? Response (Adnan) is related to privatization, lowering cost of online education. (John) It need not diminish faculty role, if it’s done properly.<br />Question: what are the characteristics of the future.&nbsp; Response: uncertainty and complexity, and bhow you learn to function within that.<br /><br />Question: Impact of Purdue buying Kaplan. Part of the debate over education being public vs private good. There continues to be interesting relationships. Even in China, Ali Baba is getting involved with Peking University.<br /><br />Questions: comments on the impact of global digital companies in education. Will they privatize the sector, wipe out public institutions? Response: UOIT - we ran some scenarios. One was exactly this. The question is, who is aggregating the competencies for that degree? Answer (John). A lot depends on the future demand for credentials. Discussion of the value of degrees. But we went down this road before - in the dot com bust.<br /><br />Question: (Response) logarithmic segregation. We are getting funneled information. We are being blocked from each other.<br /><br />Question: how do we ensure private sector serves the poor? Or misuse their trust? How do we prevent online being used as a vehicle for privatization? (Response) we said: Education is a public good. But doesn’t mean it has to be provided by the public sector. Response: the argument is that the government is not able to provide spaces, so the private sector does it. What are the models we set up for access, inclusion, etc. Answer: in Europe - education is mainly public - but there is the influence of the private sector forcing institutions to adapt.https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-future-isnt-what-it-used-to-be.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-7477584514788718913Tue, 17 Oct 2017 15:47:00 +00002017-10-17T14:34:33.251-04:00Technology, Resources and Innovation<h4></h4><h3>David Porter, Lena Patterson, Chris Fernlund<br /><em>eCampus Ontario &nbsp;- Rethinking</em></h3>eCampus Ontario - owned by 45 universities and colleges in Ontario, funded by the provincial government<br /><br />As we move forward, tech and learning will be forever inter-related. You won’t be able to get away from that idea. &nbsp;We are focusing a lot on faculty and rethinking the attributes faculty will need in order to be successful in the future: teaching for learning, curating, etc. (photo)<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w7i-ZHGTiq0/WeYmDCd7r3I/AAAAAAAAKok/SGZeuEzldicKFjlrCZKw9Wv2k4Ur0EZYQCLcBGAs/s1600/2017-10-15c-2390.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1068" data-original-width="1600" height="266" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w7i-ZHGTiq0/WeYmDCd7r3I/AAAAAAAAKok/SGZeuEzldicKFjlrCZKw9Wv2k4Ur0EZYQCLcBGAs/s400/2017-10-15c-2390.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br />‘Rethinking’ is our thene, rething resources, learning, etc.<br /><br />Lena - Learning Resources<br /><br />We’re working to redefine and adapt open educational resources. These are defined by a set of ‘5R’ permissions that allow you to reuse them. ODERs have a huge impact on students, both in access and affordability. We’ve impacted 5,000 students nd saved them $400K.<br /><br />What happens when we bring teaching and learning into the open. We explored this in March at OCAD University. The government oook notice, announcing an additional $1M for open creation nand adaptation in key communities.<br /><br />We also have the open textbook library. Students can quickly find the text they need. But we’re thinking beyond discoverability - we want them to be able to adapt and contextualize. Also, our partnership with Ryerson is for Ontario right now, but what does it look like when you work beyond borders?<br /><br />Chris - Learning Experiences<br /><br />We cannot understand learning experiences without consulting with the students. So we strategically cultivated student thought, integrating them into the learning design process. We launched an SXD studio - ‘student experience design’ - and threw students into the design process, connected them with vendors, and launched an SXD lab for prototyping and testing ideas. They adhere to a strick design ideation process so they don’t just jump to solutions. So students now drive a number of initiatives at eCampus Ontario.<br /><br />David - Recognition of Learning<br /><br />Students learn other things outside formal learning which are not recognized, eg. Volunteer experience. With CanCred.ca we have build an open badge system for Ontario. We have 10 pilots running right now to build other ways of recognizing students. It’s also a focus for the research organizations in the province.<br /><br />What we’re aiming for is what we call the t-shaped student. Cross-domain skills and attutudes with deep knowledge in a central area. The 3DCV - capacity, resilience, etc.<br /><br /><h3>Heather Cole and Katherine Prescott<br /><em>Designing Artificially Intelligent Simulations for Academic professional Education</em></h3>(Katherine Prescott presenting) Our practitioners need to be able to develop inter-personal relationships. Traditional programs tend to focus on subject knowledge because it’s easy to teach and assess. But we incorporate the other elements into our learning through things like cases or role playing. But their use in online learning is challenging and we observe students graduating without these critical skills.<br /><br />This outlines a simulation development process in law. There are four stages: design, development, implement and improve.<br /><br />The design stage includes the following: learning outcomes, leading to assessment, leading to scenario development. We found that developers got bogged down trying to incorporate legal facts into the scenarios. So we weren’t focused on developing substantive knowledge, but rather, critical (relationship) skills for these simulations.<br /><br />The development stage is handled by Ametros Learning using IBM Watson, taking professional knowledge and converting it into an interactive simulation. Initially, it’s a text-based simulation. We hope students will approach the simulation as though it were a client meeting, with the computer responding. We know in other scenarios Watson has been very effective. The development stage is accompanied with an iterative testing process.<br /><br />In the implementation face, we use it in teaching. The plan is to pilot the simulation in a first year law class ‘introduction to legal skills’. We also hope to implement the tool in clinic programs - Queens offers five legal clinics in the community.<br /><br />Finally, the improvement stage involves the gathering of data to revise, expand the program and inform progress. We hope for more expanded simulations, and maybe to incorporate some of the domain-specific law knowledge. Also, the evaluation can identify potential gaps in the knowledge., eg. Maybe we need additional diversity training.<br /><br />In the future we hope to engage with colleagues at the national and international level. They may help us test, implement and improve our solution. We’re also looking at extending into other professions - medicine, engineering and business, for example. This may give us the opportunity to include interactions with many professions all at once.<br /><br /><h3>Stephen Laster<br /><em>The Fundamental Promise of Ed Tech</em></h3>I was dyslexic and frankly hated school. I couldn’t learn standing at the chalkboard because I wrote my letters backward.<br /><br />We are at a interesting moment in time. People presenting are in the thick of it - at McGraw Hill we are an enabler, but you are the producer.<br /><br />The point is, how many of you could go back to your office and produce a really engaging and successful learning experience? Few? None? How do you solve for the costs and difficulty?<br /><br />With additional cost, if you create additional access, and scale, that’s called investment, and it’s OK. But if we increase costs without results, that’s not OK.<br /><br />If we can use AI to take someone who is afraid of math and give them continuous feedback and help them learn, that is impressive. Story of his daughter using the tech to improve learning.<br /><br />Take that base scaffolding and then wrap a learning community around it, based on great teaching, great technology, and the power it provides. I see that technology today, in pockets. It’s here. I saw eg. A talk in 2001 where predictions of 5 years were made - 5 years later none of them case true.<br /><br />We could develop courses by ourselves pre-technology. Now we can’t? How can we drive down costs? It’s still too hard to assemble things together.<br /><br />It’s still too hard to assemble meaningful learning experiences. So - how do we drive down the cost of content production, and how do we make sharing easier. That’s what I think about, esp. technology standards. I believe our success is built on the lego model. I look at IMS global - taking your preferred constellation of learning tools.<br /><br />It all sounds boring - but how many of you use instant messaging or email today? Consider all the problems today - gradebooks, identity, etc. The stovepipe innovations - why are you settling for it? If you stay with the stovepipes, nothing will be accomplished. We have all the technology, but we just aren’t demanding it yet.<br /><br />Think of the future where Stephen is the online learner who only thinks in pictures. This works for software quite well - but imagine knowing that ten years earlier.<br /><br />Think about: what are you doing to demand, not just OER, but for interoperability where all this becomes easier. So it’s not a question of getting the campus to adopt technology, but so that it’s just easy.<br /><h3>Mohamed Ally and Norine Wark<br /><em>Mobile Learning to Improve Access to Education</em></h3>Maybe 80 million people in the world without access to education. That means 190 million schools, $250 billion, and a million teachers. So the question is, is the traditional model the best way to approach education?<br /><br />Reference: the Incheon Declaration &amp; Framework for Action: by 2030 ensure equal access to all women and men to education. How can we do that with the present education system?<br />They came up with strategies that include distance education, OERs, online learning, MOOC, etc. We need to work with UNESCO to help them achieve their goal by 2030. Without mobile technology it will be impossible to reach their goal.<br /><br />Yes, we need improved access. Some schools are just desks and chairs. Some risk their lives to get to school. It doesn’t make sense - we have technology, we have learning materials - why not provide these to the students?<br /><br />Some projects we’re involved in:<br /><ul><li>Tablets in remote locations in Pakistan referenced this morning - we gave tablets &amp; provide teacher training in the Swat Valley. We reported on student disabilities - with tablets they could expand the text</li><li>Smartphones in the distributed workplace in Qatar - many workers in Qattar are expats and their first language is not English - so we used pps to help them learn while they worked</li><li>3D glasses and tablets in augmented reality in the workplace doing the evaluation of this project now</li></ul>Norine<br /><ul><li>Various mobile devices in graduatelevel DE programs, a SSHRC project - measuring cognitive, emotional and teaching presences. We noticed during the study students shifted from Backberry-Apple to Android. We studied compatibility issues and notice the change in instructor attitudes, improvements to Moodle, and new educational apps, all in three years.</li><li>2year SSHRC funded collaborative Literacy Uplift app for Canadian adult learners. It’s a device-agnostic cross-platform application for adults with low literacy skills.</li></ul>In 2012 Wu and colleagues completed a major mobile learning metastudy collecting 164 studies. Most reported positive outcomes (95%). <br /><br />Mohamed<br /><br />How we can provide education for all so we can have peace around the world. OER will help make education affordable, and mobile learning will make learning accessible. Eg. CoL Aptus device by Commonwealth of Learning. <a href="http://www.unesco.org/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/ED/images/Venkataraman.pdf">http://www.unesco.org/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/ED/images/Venkataraman.pdf</a><br /><br />Discussion<br /><br /><br />Question: How can we assess the attainment of critical skills from simulations? Answer: not sure. We have colleagues in medicine who are very experienced with simulations, so we have some expertise we can tap into. Critical skills are not easy to assess, and it takes time to acquire them.<br /><br />Question: is the acceptance of mobile learning related to age? Answer: we find ore acceptance with younger kids than older generation. Mostly because screen size on mobile is very small. But because of 3D glasses, you can use that and have a full-screen projection, so tech is changing.<br /><br />Question: thoughts on how to drive costs of content production down. Answer: learning experiences are dynamic. Costs are: curation, chunking, and production of visual assets. There are opportunities in all three of those areas. Eg. First two, standardization and taxonomies can really hep.<br /><br />Question: facilitating minority language access in Manitoba. Answer: area of interest for eCampus Ontario, looking for indigenous and French-language material.<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Question: how do you plan to scale the SXD initiative? Answer: it’s an experiment. Still just kicking the idea around, first with a kickstarter event, and now into the lab process. All these projects upon completion will be openly licenszed.<o:p></o:p></div>https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/technology-resources-and-innovation.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-1284642758493834338Tue, 17 Oct 2017 14:12:00 +00002017-10-17T10:21:04.227-04:00World Conference in Online Learning - Opening Plenary<h2>Opening Plenary</h2><br /><h3>Laura Czerniewicz<br /><em>Changing Pedagogies</em></h3>Two short stories about pedagogy:<br /><br />1. There have been protests recently in South African universities. Interestingly, some of these have been about pedagogy. They demanded, among other things, that all lectures should be recorded, and that a tutoring system should be put in place in all courses.<br /><br />2. A formal course in the engineering faculty, where the standard pedagogy has shifted from one-to-many to a collaborative teaching style, even to the point where students are taken to the actual places where the teaching is applied, and practitioners in the community are taking part in the teaching. So the teachers are not the only authorities.<br /><br />Pedagogy happens at the activity and course level, but changes in pedagogy ripple across the system. Changes in pedagogy impact practices, and change culture and relationships, and lead to profound changes in universities themselves. Changes include distance, diversity, inclusion of new participants. Students are also calling for curriculum to be decolonized, calling for a rethink in how knowledge is shared. It’s not about knowledge transfer, it’s about co-construction of knowledge.<br /><br />Two key points about pedagogical change:<br />1. They are highly emotive<br />2. They are deeply political<br /><br />Change is often about unlearning, relearning. The changes in pedagogy happening offline are being reflected online. Online, the experience can be alienating or engaging, empowering or disempowering. These are the challenges faced by learning designers. Commitment to care, commitment and inclusion is essential. It requires talking about politics and about power.<br /><br />It highlights student agency and the different ways this play out. The concept of students as customers contrasts with the concept of student as citizens. Who is the student? Which student? Who is heard? Students don’t have one voice.<br /><br />The role of the educator is also under scrutiny. Partners are being brought in from anywhere in the world. It opens the possibility for service learning an social responsibility. The role is shifting to ‘guide on the side’ - but there are dangers in the current age of anti-intellectualism.<br /><br />In short, the online shakes up the power dynamics of the classroom, potentially empowering, and potentially exclusionaly. How are these power dynamics as teaching moves online. And what is the student experience like, and what ae the implications?<br /><br /><h3>Asha S. Kanwar<br /><em>Expanding Access, Openness and Flexibility</em></h3>Short intro about the Commonwealth of Learning. CoL believes that learning is essential to sustainable development. We focus on people at the bottom of the pyramid. How do we think of teaching online where no one is left behind.<br /><br />First point: Access - for whom? Only 8 percent in sub-Sahara Africa has access to tertiary government. South Asia is 23 percent. How do we get there. The world has agreed on sustainable development goals - goal 4 calls for sustainable and inclusive education.<br /><br />There is evidence that the participation of women is increasing not only in OECD countries but also in developing countries. Affordability is the key barrier to access to education. Indicators related to poverty are far greater than those related to gender. People with disabilities are also disadvantaged. This conference is a platform for all of us to come up with ideas and better solutions.<br /><br />Second point: can openness improve access. Even in the US, 40 percept of people report they drop a course because of the high cost of textbooks. One of the key benefits of using OER is to lower the cost of education.<br /><br />But many institutions are reluctant to embrace this. Why? Is it because institutions don’t have the autonomy to do this? Only 8 of 40 countries gave institutions full autonomy. Most developing countries have centralized systems of education that do not allow openness.<br /><br />Third: flexibility. 1986: Desmond Keegan said many universities are inflexible and slow to change to meet community needs. Are we more flexible today? Even in the US, 20% of people are without broadband. But access to broadband is very low in eg. Africa. Wireless appears to be the answer. But is wireless broadband the answer? It can cost as much as 50 percent of a family’s income. And women are less likely to own a phone in some countries.<br /><br />Given all this, can online learning reach the unreached? Can it be resource neutral? Examples of things like tablets, wireless, solar charging, etc.<br /><br />Conclusions:<br />1. equity and inclusion won’t happen by themselves<br />2. Institutions will need to embrace openness<br />3. Technology by itself does not increase access<br /><br /><h3>Mark Milliron<br /><em>Changing Models of Assessment</em></h3>Yes I’m from the US, and we’ve had some challenges recently, but that’s not what I will talk about.<br />We’re facing really challenges in helping people become successful. It is indicated by incolme. We’re facing post-traumatic assessment disorder. They’re pushing assessment on us, both tests, also learning analytics are pushing us this way.<br /><br />Consider: who the learners are. 20 years ago we had a pretty good understanding. Only 20% were ‘non-traditional’. Now that has flipped; most are now non-traditional. Our last report looked at part time students. If we look at the data, we will not be successful unless we serve non-traitional and part time students. People are not focusing on part time students because their reporting forces them to focus on full time. Where institutions focus on them achievement is just as good, but where they don’t, there’s a 30 point gap.<br /><br />What is the role of assessment in how we learn. They’re linked to time-based models of learning. We now know that this is radically inefficient. So we’re seeing an increase in competency-based learning. Western Governors University does this; 20 years ago it was a radical idea. But this has been really challenging to traditional higher ed. But also looking at the affective domain of learning - how you feel about it, what’s the best way to learn (Siemens, Thiel).<br /><br />Finally, the question is about why students succeed and what’s their biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is academic. Colleges are losing more students above 2.0 than below 2.0. 40-45% were between 3.0-4.0 - high achievement students. Students leave for a family reasons - some academic, but also psycho-social reasons, life and logistics. We have different kinds of learners and we need different kinds of models.<br /><br />In all three of these areas, these are things we thought we knew, but the data show us this isn’t necessarily true. We have to focus on policy change and practice change in each of these three areas. We have to have assessment and reporting regimes that allow us to actually look at these different students. What we’ve seen is we can get personalized pathway information for students, we can help them stay. The right message at the right toime to encourage students makes all the difference. Students should be captains of their own ship - if they can look at the data they can at least help in their own rescue.<br /><br /><h3>Neil Fassina<br /><em>New Delivery Tools and Resources for Learning</em></h3>Where we’ve been: not so long ago we became excited about the entry of an overhead projector. Or a whiteboard. And the ability to use these technologies was almost unlimited. Soon the world shifted and we were able to shift everything into PowerPoint. But for the first time this included more thn just the educator: it included IT. Also, not all of us could maximize the potential of this new tool.<br /><br />We are also talking about limiting cellphones and shutting down wifi so students would be distracted. At the same time in distance learning came the emergence of online courses. The telephone was no longer primary; it would be supplemented by email. But again, we had more difficulty maximizing these tools. An we were forced to ask questions we had not asked before, eg. What is the role of content. Or, how etexts were not just digital versions of the text.<br /><br />The change continues. We master one technology just as the next is beginning to be pushed into our environment. We embrace technologies we used to try to keep at bay. We see ourselves pulling from multiple industries - gaming, AR, deep learning, AI. Today natural language tech can simultaneously translates texts. People from around the world can feel like they’re in the same room. Or or phone can make us feel like we’re in a Socratic debate.<br /><br />In all this, open and distance education institutions have taken it upon themselves to lead the way. But at the same time, we’re seeing the increasing commodification of information. People looking for knowledge need not look to a university; they just use Google. We’re lokking at calls for inclusive access to learning with rapid shifts in demographics. Increasing calls for accountability.<br /><br />We need to do a double duty: asing not only questions others ask, but also questions others do not. Eg., does the technology improve outcomes? Does it increase learner success? How can we maximize its utility? We need to be looking at the future while other institutions adopt the approaches we have been pioneering for 50 years. We can test our assumptions about shifting roles, how learning is defined, how learners can become partners in both 4 year degrees or lifelong learning.<br /><br />What is the role for an open university in the age of online higher education? Is it to test , adopt, and even drop techs at faster speeds? To have an ever-present readiness for what comes next. There’s no instruction manual for this.<br /><br /><h3>Stephen Murgatroyd<br /><em>Redefining Existing University Business Models</em></h3>Image: the boiling frog. People have been waiting for higher ed to change since I’ve been about 4. We’re seeing lots of pockets of innovation, but very rarely in the same place at the same time. I have five comments to make:<br /><br />1. Institutions are rethinking their value proposition, partially because they are being asked to, partially because of market forces. Some are succeeding, but others are struggling financially and ideologically. Eg. 22 UK universities rely on student fees for over 65% of their income, and Brexit really worries them. Part of these value propositions have to do with part time students, flexible credentials<br /><br />2. Reimagining business processes. Some to do with analytics, but we’re also seeing unbundling going on. Eg. Kentucky has a system of on-demand credentials, where 365 days a year you can start short term short courses for stackable microcredentials. There are MOOCs and OERs. Also blockchain.<br /><br />3. The changes in learning supports. Eg. Peer-to-peer review, assessment, support mechanisms. New forms of assessment. There’s lots more use of analytics to help students progress and the use of AI for student support services. Eg. Case in Georgia Tech where ‘Jill Watson’ bot fooled the students.<br /><br />4. The hyper-scaling of platforms for global reach is happening. In 2016 56 million people registered for a MOOC. This is a lot. This is a big deal MOOCs are dead? Really? They’re not dead; they’re different. The business model might not work for some providers. But they are being adapted and can be used to create credentials. We have a growing number of transnational credentialing systems. Small nations of the Commonwealth, OERu, etc.<br /><br />5. Most institutions are seeking out and trying to secure new markets. For example, seniors - this is the wealthiest generation of seniors ever. There’s a strong focus on some specific groups: eg., girls and women, the education of boys (esp. where they are withdrawing from students). There’s also the focus on STEM and coding (not really the future - the future is creativity).<br /><br />These models face a number of constraints. One is austerity, which is getting worse. Another is the mistaken neoliberal idea that competition is better than cooperation. Also issues around accountability, quality assurance, and leadership.<br /><br />In this conference there are sessions about the future, which I encourage you to attend.<br />Finally: what are the implications for faculty? And second, isn’t collaboration better than competition for our future?https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/world-conference-in-online-learning.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-3201534355084228535Mon, 16 Oct 2017 20:18:00 +00002017-10-16T16:20:58.657-04:00Teaching in the Digital Age: Guidelines for Designing Teaching and Learning<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aon9-tQ1MOc/WeUT5wtLiQI/AAAAAAAAKoU/Y4-KvRZWN4c3oDeB2uUN9oWsx_YNLbF1QCLcBGAs/s1600/Tony%2BBates.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1054" data-original-width="1600" height="261" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aon9-tQ1MOc/WeUT5wtLiQI/AAAAAAAAKoU/Y4-KvRZWN4c3oDeB2uUN9oWsx_YNLbF1QCLcBGAs/s400/Tony%2BBates.PNG" width="400" /></a><i><br /></i><i>Summary notes from the Tony Bates presentation at&nbsp;<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lora, serif; font-size: 16px;">the&nbsp;</span><a href="http://onlinelearning2017.ca/en/" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #bf8b38; font-family: Lora, serif; font-size: 16px; text-decoration-line: none;">World Conference on Online Learning</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lora, serif; font-size: 16px;">, Toronto</span></i><br /><i>.</i><br /><br />1. Building an Effective Learning Environment<br /><br />What is knowledge, and how does learning occur. Analogy: coal. We can think of knowledge as coal, and shovel it into a furnace (this is the objectivist perspective). Or we can think of knowledge as developmental, for example, heat. This is the constructivist perspective. Heat is a concept you don’t just deliver - it’s a concept you build and construct over time (sometimes through the use of coal).<br /><br />Or, we can think of teaching as gardening. We’re creating the environment where people learn naturally, without our having to force them to do it.<br /><br />So - do we think of learning this way? (Some discussion)<br /><br />Now there is an argument for coal - some things you just have to remember. Memory is an important ability - we should use that.<br /><br />There are many possible learning environments: campus or school (this one, eg., is a bad one), online course, personal experience, online personal learning environments, etc. All of these need certain common elements that support learning. And that’s what I want to focus on…<br /><br />What are these common elements? Consider eg., military training, online course, nature as a learning environment. Or (suggested from audience) MOOCs, hospital, sports…<br /><br />Think of a learning environment from a teacher’s perspective: we have learner characteristics, assessment, resources, learner support, skills, content… And permeating all of these is culture. This influences everything. For example, consider the residential schools - it was the culture, the values and belief systems that underpin the institution - that made everything else wrong.<br /><br />So the question is, what kind of cultural values do you want to have implicit in what you teach? We need to think of this - it’s a chance to break away from institutional cultures, which are not always good things.<br /><br />Additionally, different kinds of technologies provide different kinds of learning environments. Consider the LMS - not entirely bad, everyone needs filing cabinets. But there can also be virtual worlds, or personal learning environments.<br /><br />But note: it may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient, to have a good learning environment. You need good course design, empathy, competence (which is where professors excel), and the imagination to create context. Meanwhile, the learners have to do the learning. You have to step back. People say online learning is so much work - but you can have the students do the work.<br /><br />There’s no one perfect learning environment. The best one is the one that works for you in your context (that’s why comparative research on online education always fails - it strips the context out).<br /><br />Question: is that all? Is there more to a successful learning environment?<br />-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A place to create<br />-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A place for students to have community<br />-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Kids can’t learn if they’re hungry<br /><br />Comment: I’m not so sure there’s an ‘institutional culture’ - in a world with multiple cultures. Tont replies: if the institution is not going to allow you to create your own culture, then you have a big struggle ahead. Linda Harasin said, the university never asked me if I was doing online learning, so how do they know I am doing it? If they knew I was doing it they would stopped me.<br /><br />Comment: if the student is used to coal, they can have difficulty with the other stuff.<br /><br />Comment: where is it that the expertise on learning resides at the institution? At AU, we use people who have that expertise help us with course design, so experts don’t have to do this as well as their own discipline. Tony: we can have these centres for online learning, but they don’t scale to the whole institution.<br /><br />2. Choosing an Appropriate Delivery Mode<br /><br />If students can access the course online, why do they need to go to the university? There’s a lot of research in online learning, but in face-to-face there isn’t the same research The presumption is that it must be better. But we have found that in many cases the online works better.<br /><br />To define out subject: there’s a continuum of delivery from pure face-to-face to classroom aids, flipped learning, hybrid learning (reduced class time), and fully online distance learning. We did a survey - we’re seeing how much this is beginning to spread in Canadian universities. I saw this in Britain as well. Let’s be honest about this - even in a traditional class, all students are really online.<br /><br />Discussion:<br />-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Comment: One thing missing from this is the synchronous-asynchronous discussion. Eg. Classes where students watch videos. Tony: I interviewed various people doing ‘pockets of innovation’ - eg. Quebec, they have cold winters, a professor uses videoconferencing in class, giving students the choice, and there’s an effect in retention.<br /><br />-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Comment: we often talk about learning styles for students, but much less about teaching styles for teachers. Colleagues say, eg., “I’m not good at facilitating, I’m much better at lecturing.” Tony: bad news: faculty are going to have to change, because other providers will come along and do it instead. Good news: I see faculty changing all the time, not because of the LMS, but because of simple tech, like the iPhone. But it won’t happen fast enough without institutional support. But it’s like driving a car: you can’t just say “I’m good at shifting gears, but I’m no good at steering.”<br /><br />-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Comment: shouldn’t be a continuum of delivery, but of teaching? Tony: there are different ways we can teach. Delivery is about student convenience. What does the student want? The question is: what’s the added value of them coming in to the physical location?<br /><br />3. Four Criteria for Choosing:<br /><br />i. Students - which models work for them? Maybe multiple models work for them. There’s no one model - there are ypung, old, dependent, independent, etc. Let the students choose, and if they’re struggling, help them.<br /><br />ii. identifying teaching approach + necessary learner activities. This is based on what you think knowledge is and how best to approach it. If there are skills you want them to learn, what do they have to do to learn those skills? What kind of activities do you need to build in? Note: skills are not generic. Problem-solving is not the same in business as it is in medicine.<br /><br />iii. What resources do I have available? Do I have a TA? Etc.<br /><br />iv. Analyze the most appropriate mode for each learner activity. Eg. The theory they can do online. But if they have to learn how to observe analytes under a microscope, then you either need virtual equipment, or a real lab (in science, too often, we don’t teach them how do design experiments, we just give them the experiment to do). The idea is: push as much as you can online, and do the rest in person.<br /><br />What is the research showing when face-to-face interaction is needed?<br />-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;(SD - some quick Google searching) Fast Company:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/3051518/the-science-of-when-you-need-in-person-communication">https://www.fastcompany.com/3051518/the-science-of-when-you-need-in-person-communication</a>&nbsp;; Mercola&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/10/08/face-to-face-meetings.aspx">https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/10/08/face-to-face-meetings.aspx</a>&nbsp;; ScienceDirect - size of groups vs Facebook -&nbsp;<a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160119213014.htm">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160119213014.htm</a><br /><br />Also, a comment: we teach nurses, but we can’t get the students to learn to form a relationship when it’s with a sim.<br /><br />Finally: what do we do on campus? Are there unique teaching/learning functions? Is there an impact on campus design? It’s a lot cheaper to do stuff online that to build a new building. One campus example has meeting rooms, breakout rooms, etc. The people researching this? Steelcase - a furniture maker. They have a PhD working on this.https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/pedagogical-principles-of-design-for_16.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-1748260021770048257Mon, 16 Oct 2017 18:22:00 +00002017-10-16T14:34:54.059-04:00Pedagogical Principles of Design for Active, Reflective and Self-Regulated Learning<h4><span style="font-weight: normal;">Session summaries&nbsp;from the <a href="http://onlinelearning2017.ca/en/">World Conference on Online Learning</a>, Toronto</span></h4><h3>Maureen Andrade -&nbsp;<em>Self-Regulated Learning, Course Design, and Pedagogy: A Model for Learner Success</em></h3>Practical ideas to help students succeed in an online course. The focus is on self-regulated learning, defined as “the ability to control the factors and conditions that affect learning.” (Dembo, Junge &amp; Lynch, 2006)<br /><br />But they may not know how. Students need to do activities in each of these dimensions (don’t make them optional). First, students evaluate their own strengths &amp; weaknesses, then they focus on something to work on from the list.<br /><ul><li>Motives eg. Listen to a clip taking about a pilot having to learn English</li><li>Methods eg what’s my learning style (authoritative, communicative, analytical, concrete)</li><li>Time ask self-reflective questions about time management</li><li>Physical activity where they look at the different places they study</li><li>Social Environment make plan for tutoring session &amp; be responsible for learning in the session</li><li>Performance self-assessment, reflecting on goals, etc.</li></ul>These can be applied in other contexts, including in your own courses.<br /><br /><h3>Maristela Petrovic-Dzerdz &amp; Anne Trepanier<br /><em>Online Hunting, Gathering and Sharing: Return to Experiential Learning in a Digital Age</em></h3>We were historically hunters and gatherers, and more than anything, sharers, This is how we have traditionally learned, in contrast to the organized learning of industrialized societies. In the latter, people work on their own - at their own desk, doing their own work, etc. And this mode of learning has largely propagated into the digital world: learn at your own pace, etc. But this may be an even more isolating process.<br /><br />By contrast: learn from experience. We will share today a couple of assignments we created for a course ‘Introduction to Quebec Society’ where we emulate the traditional forms of learning.<br /><br />First: primary source assignment. Learn about primary and secondary sources. We ask them to look for these sources, but we guide that process, eg., asking for sources from certain time periods, or from one of the main three threads in the course.<br /><br />Then, when they find the source, we ask them to reflect on them: why did they select the source, how does it relate to the topic? Then they upload and they share. This is a database activity, so it’s easily searchable. Students are then encouraged to use each others’ sources in discussion and debate.<br /><br />We find that because this is an online debate the work is of high quality. They reference their sources! They form a real sense of cohort. We will discuss in more detail next Wednesday.<br /><br /><h3>Fernando Gamboa-Rodriguez &amp; Rosario Freixas-Flores<br /><em>A new self-reflection approach for a teacher training mixed program</em></h3>We have developed a new way to work in collaborative development spaces and the classroom. We asked professors what they use tech for: it’s mostly videos and PowerPoint slides. So most of the use doesn’t change the way we see lectures: we give better explanations and more produced materials, but the basis of the learning still remains the same. But while teachers have the ICT skills to do better, but they have difficulties integrating them into their lectures.<br /><br />So what’s so hard about this?<br /><br />The problem is, we still teach in a very behaviouristic way. We need to find ways to move teaching into something more inquiry-oriented, something that requires them to practice and reflect and explore.<br /><br />Eg. One case is a diploma on teaching with ICT in Chile. There are three main stages in the diploma: self-reflection workshop, instructional design workshop, and then work in the classroom. They begin by expressing their expectations, goals and achievements, and then design their own materials integrating new instructional strategies, then apply them in the classroom.<br /><br />We are basically asking teachers to do the same thing they are expecting their students to do. So there is no ‘Part 2’ to this program. We expect teachers to carry on on their own.<br />Today, teacher training in the use of technology relies on an old outdated model. Teachers can do better, but they need tutoring to achieve this. Tutoring and peer-learning models promise better results.<br /><br /><h3>Normand Roy &amp; Sonia Lefebvre<br /><em>How to Promote Active Learning</em></h3>A traditional webconference tool is shown. However it represents a classic classroom where the teacher controls everything. There are limits on what I can see. It’s too complex to use. It’s difficult to share the environment to students so they can share.<br /><br />We have 6 minutes to try sharing. Three pays:<br /><ol><li>Padlet <a href="http://padlet.com/royno/icde2017">http://padlet.com/royno/icde2017</a></li><li>Realtime Board - <a href="https://realtimeboard.com/app/board/o9J_k0NPFoo=/">https://realtimeboard.com/app/board/o9J_k0NPFoo=/</a></li><li>Answergarden</li></ol>Pedagogical values in these applications:<br /><ul><li>P 21st century skills</li><li>Ck ICT integration framework, media literacy, etc</li><li>T learning by doing, collaboration and sharing</li></ul><h4></h4><h3>Discussion (full panel)</h3>It’s very humbling to teach online. The information is already there. I’m there to help students. Students are the actors in their own development, and I’m a guide.<br /><br />Re: attention spans. Chunked learning. Also - it’s really important to have students reflect on what they have done. The students are not captive any more; it’s our task to captivate them. Active learning: where people need to do something, bring something. I try to let them find stuff, bring stuff.https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/pedagogical-principles-of-design-for.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-1511211547105353049Sat, 14 Oct 2017 22:21:00 +00002017-10-14T18:25:32.693-04:00What I Would Have Done DifferentlyI received the following inquiry recently:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I find it fascinating that you have maintained a career in public service while pursuing your intellectual endeavors on the side. With the Internet full of articles and courses about "How to turn your blog into a business!", I love it that you have shown us a model that anyone can follow: write from love - work for your money.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">However, I know you have written about some of the challenges of that model in "What I Learned Using Paypal."&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">I am 32 and am very interested in anything that you have to say on the topic.<br />Do you have any distilled, pure-gold wisdom for those of us earlier on the path? What would you have done differently? Etc</blockquote>When I was 32 it was 1992 and I was at the start of my academic career. This is a later start than most people, but I had to deal with things first. I had recently written what for me was a <a href="http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/2009/03/tnp-1-introduction.html">defining essay</a> on connectionism and networks and then a few very angry papers on related topics.<br /><br />It had been 11 years since I had a full time job and would be another 3 years before I would land at Assiniboine Community College. I was using the computer to write by then (had been since 1985 or so, and had been working on computers since 1979) and was already doing some internet-related stuff (mostly around MUDs).<br /><br />So I didn't think at the time that I would be able to do <i>anything</i>&nbsp;for money, let alone write. If you are 32 and have a job, career prospects, or anything similar, then you're ahead of where I was at that age. Yes, I could write, and write pretty well, and yes, the opportunities came eventually.<br /><br />For example, I remember one time in 1998 or so I was invited by the Washington Post to write a column for their weekend magazine called 'Stalking Logical Fallacies' based on a couple of entries in <a href="http://www.fallacies.ca/">Stephen's Guide</a> to the Logical Fallacies. I wrote the first one and they paid me $US 500 and asked me to continue sending them.<br /><br />I never did. I've often wondered why. It's not like I didn't need the money. I remember disliking the idea that each column would be about <i>two</i>&nbsp;logical fallacies, not just one. It didn't have the right sort of symmetry to me. I've always been like that: if the least sort of thing doesn't feel right, I don't do it. Maybe that's something I should have changed.<br /><br />There was plenty of time in the late 1990s to make my name writing for newspapers and magazines and I could have been successful at it. I kept <i>writing</i>, of course. But I never felt this urgent desire to get published, let alone be paid. I don't like working with publishers - I <i>still</i>&nbsp;don't - because they don't like my work the way it is; they want to make changes, they want me to get permission to use quotes, they want me to format it just so.<br /><br />Each request feels like a personal affront, a betrayal. I remember once I gave a talk called <a href="http://www.downes.ca/presentation/188">My Digital Identity</a> that I thought was pretty good. I was asked to prepare the talk as a paper for a journal, <a href="http://www.downes.ca/post/53445">which I did</a>. I then received feedback from the editor saying that it was quite inadequate, that it didn't have a proper literature review or experimental method, and that it would have to be extensively revised before it could be considered. It felt like a punch in the gut. If they didn't want the paper, they should never have asked.<br /><br />Could I have learned to be less sensitive. It's hard to say. I think that people who want to make money writing and producing content have to have a much greater tolerance for rejection than I have. I don't know whether that tolerance is something you can grow or whether it's something you just have.<br /><br />So there's that. And I <i>love</i>&nbsp;writing for free, on my own blog, where nobody tells me what to do. Stuff like this would <i>never</i>&nbsp;be published. I wish that I had started earlier - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet">UseNet</a> existed back in the 1980s and I could have spent a lot more time reading and writing - as it was I spent a lot of time chatting and coding.<br /><br />Those are trade-offs. I spent a <i>lot</i>&nbsp;of time writing useless code. I wrote a Star Trek game in Basic. I created an entire MUD clan system in LPC. I returned to Star Trek in Borland Turbo C. I wrote an LMS for Assiniboine. I've been coding my website for two decades. Every minute I'm coding I'm not writing, which means I'm not getting paid (<i>nobody</i>&nbsp;pays me to write software - heh). But I'm learning. Would I spend less time coding? Maybe, if getting paid for writing was more important to me. But I think I'd miss the deep experience of chasing bugs at three a.m.<br /><br />But I <i>did</i>&nbsp;end up spending a lot of time reading and writing; this began with my Assiniboine job and I had the space to start contributing to mailing lists (one thing I would <i>not</i>&nbsp;change is the amount of time I spent on my job working on my own stuff - if I did only what I was told, I would not have a career). My blog began as a place to save my mailing list posts, because I believed the mailing list posts might one day be lost (I was right; most of these archives don't exist any more).<br /><br />I'm not sure how much I've written that is lost forever. Tons of email - there will never be a "Correspondence of Stephen Downes" because most of it vanished into the ether. I regret that (even given that 99 percent of my email is junk). But of the stuff that was not email, most of it exists, either as paper in my basement, or on my website. I've saved all my class notes (which by the end of university I was writing as essays composed in class just for fun, because there was enough time to listen to the lecture, make sense of what was being said, and write it as an article - today we call that 'liveblogging' and it's definitely a skill worth cultivating).<br /><br />My career was created through the interventions of a few people in my life: Carrie MacWilliams, who recommended me for a tutoring position with Athabsaca (and Mary Richardson, who cultivated me through sever years of doing that); Jeff McLaughlin, who recommended I apply to Assiniboine (I don't <i>like</i>&nbsp;applying for jobs but he convinced me); Rik Hall, who found something worth sharing in my posts to the WWWDev mailing list and insisted I contribute to NAWeb; Rory McGreal and Terry Anderson, who moved me back into academia, first at the University of Alberta, then at NRC;&nbsp; James Morrison, who was always happy to have another contribution from me and who encouraged me to start recording (and transcribing) my talks; and Maxim Jean Louis, who has encouraged me to contribute to Contact North.<br /><br />Honestly, I would have been happy living in my cabin in the north writing code, teaching a few courses, and spending my evenings at Ernie's bar in <a href="http://www.downes.ca/post/38568">Eaglesham</a>. I'd write some philosophy papers, read Wittgenstein late into the evening, and go walking with my cat. <br /><br />I write this thinking I should say something like "maybe I should have been more ambitious", but I'm not sure I regard ambition as an unequivocal good. I've tried ambition various times in the past; I was graduate student president for a couple of years and tried to parlay that into a political career, but I lost the nomination because I didn't sell any memberships (I only lost by seven votes, though). More recently, I tried my hand at management, and lasted almost three years, but management is pretty political and I am not (as it turns out) a very political person.<br /><br />So although I have a number of pieces of writing and publications I could have sold, the vast majority of them are things that people asked me to do, often involving the conversion of work I had <i>already</i>&nbsp;done for free into a formal publication. My presentations are the same way - I don't go out asking to deliver keynotes here and there, instead, people write me and ask if I could. Only in the last few years have I really thought about being paid for this, and even now, the objective is mostly to make sure I don't lose money giving talks.<br /><br />What do I take away from all this?<br /><br />Well, I think you have to be a <i>certain sort of person</i>&nbsp;to make a living writing articles (and giving talks), even if you're good at it. You have to be willing to <i>sell yourself</i>&nbsp;in a way that I have never been - 'sell yourself' in the sense of marketing and advertising, and 'sell yourself' in the sense of being a pen for hire, willing to bend to what other people want. I would probably have earned a lot more money had I been either of those.<br /><br />Ah - but are these things I would have changed? My career is nowhere near over (though my time at NRC probably is, if for no other reason than retirement) but I still really don't feel like selling myself. I know that what I'm supposed to do is work my network for contacts so I can land good gigs, but I don't really remember people very well (apologies to all those I have forgotten or will forget) and I don't feel comfortable taking advantage of connections in that way.<br /><br />It's always a trade-off. If I weren't so narrowly focused and self-absorbed, and if I weren't so sensitive and averse to rejection, I could probably have marketed myself better and been a lot more successful. But then I would not have had anything worthwhile to say, because I would have been just like all those others. And I would lose my freedom and my self, which I couldn't bear.<br /><br />So, no, I wouldn't have done anything differently.<br /><br />I think about Wittgenstein a lot and spend no small amount of time comparing myself to him, even though we're very different people. The inner struggles related to worth and worthlessness he felt (so well documented in <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Ludwig-Wittgenstein-Genius-Ray-Monk/dp/0140159959">Ray Monk's biography</a>) feel very familiar to me. No doubt Wittgenstein could have been more successful had he ever finished more than one book or paid more attention to making money. But none of that would have mattered to him. And no person in the 20th century was more successful, by any standard.<br /><br />My best (and only) nugget of wisdom to pass on is this: you have to be yourself, no matter who you are. Your strengths, your weaknesses, your abilities, your handicaps - all these are yours, and you have to embrace them. Yes, you can (and you should) work to improve yourself, but the only standard that really matters will be the one you set for yourself (and you will find that you're very fickle, and will change the standard at a whim). But however you do, accept that, and move on. I spend a part of every day telling myself to accept the foolish things I did the day before (or years past).<br /><br />And, importantly, your standard <i>will</i>&nbsp;change. I remember in 1980 having no money and no food in my one-room apartment and having my mother give me $100 out of her unemployment money just to help me survive. My standard of 'making it' at that time was to have a steady job, a home without cockroaches, and maybe some friends. I expect a bit more out of my life now - but every insect-free day with food on the plate means I'm ahead of the game, and I'll never forget that.<br /><br />And, maybe - be generous. Help people in need. Share what you know. Be kind to animals. Do this not expecting some sort of return, but because you know what it is to be a living being that strives and struggles and hopes and dreams. Not because you would want others to do the same for you, but because they <i>are</i>&nbsp;you.https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/what-i-would-have-done-differently.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-4854488098708097469Fri, 06 Oct 2017 18:50:00 +00002017-10-06T14:50:38.476-04:00Elements of a Successful Panel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-N6-mwgHEEu4/WdeJgBtWzLI/AAAAAAAAKnw/eiDnVduiRcEB_Huqx2Vfa7hdKqspN3vUgCLcBGAs/s1600/Panel%2Bof%2BExperts.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="313" data-original-width="482" height="258" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-N6-mwgHEEu4/WdeJgBtWzLI/AAAAAAAAKnw/eiDnVduiRcEB_Huqx2Vfa7hdKqspN3vUgCLcBGAs/s400/Panel%2Bof%2BExperts.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>Congrats, you have an <a href="http://allmalepanels.tumblr.com/">all male panel</a>! Follow the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/allmalepanel?f=tweets&amp;vertical=default&amp;src=hash">#allmalepanel</a> hashtag on Twitter and you'll find that there's no end to the creation of bad panels and the commentators that justifiably criticize them. The Brian Savage&nbsp;<a href="http://www.art.com/products/p15062980780-sa-i6838177/brian-savage-thank-god-a-panel-of-experts-new-yorker-cartoon.htm">cartoon</a> above from the New Yorker was around and popular back in my activist days in the 1980s. It's still relevant today.<br /><br />Academic panels <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/jun/02/conference-rage-how-did-awful-panel-discussions-become-the-default-format">are often awful</a>. It's not just their all-white all-male constitution. They are self-indulgent, inward looking, dull, pretentious and boring. Duncan Green writes, "They end up being a parade of people reading out papers, or they include terrible powerpoints crammed with too many words and illegible graphics."<br /><br />There's no end either to the <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/blog/organise-successful-panel-discussion-ds00/">list</a> of articles with <a href="http://blog.addgene.org/how-to-5-steps-to-a-great-panel-discussion">tips and tools</a> on <a href="http://www.scottkirsner.com/panels.htm">how</a> to <a href="https://theprofessorisin.com/2013/03/15/how-to-organize-a-panel-for-a-conference/">organize</a> an academic panel. They focus on everything from the role of the moderator to marketing to room organization and lighting. There's a lot of emphasis on structure and control (especially by the moderator). There are hacks and strategies, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fsvtV_MKXg">Pecha Kucha</a> or <a href="http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/00-2/lp2063.shtml">talking sticks</a>.<br /><br />I'm not going to add to that list. I don't think these articles are especially helpful. Not because they're wrong but because they don't get at the heart of what makes successful panels, panels where nobody wants to leave, no matter how long it runs, where it doesn't matter whether the lighting is bad or if we forget who the speakers are or if the moderator loses control.<br /><br />I think there are some basic elements to successful panels. I list them, below, describe them, and more importantly, talk about <i>why</i>&nbsp;they are essential. I think these are it. Maybe I've left something out; if so, tell me. But I think that if you have these, you have success.<br /><br /><b>Diversity</b><br /><b><br /></b>This is where we began this post and this gets at the heart of the <i>purpose</i>&nbsp;of a panel. What we want to see is not the presentation of a single point of view, but rather, the contrast between multiple points of view. That's actually <i>why</i> we have more than one speaker on the panel.<br /><br />To create more than one point of view it is necessary to include more than one perspective. The problem with all-male panels or all-white panels is that the members may share some assumptions that would be contested by women or non-white panelists. People are often blind to things that are outside their own experience, so they might not see, for example, issues with things like being <a href="http://people.com/movies/brie-larson-tsa-agent-number/">hit on</a> by a TSA agent, or <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/07/20/jagmeet-singh-racial-profiling-ban-NDP-leadership_a_23038350/">pulled over</a> by a police officer.<br /><br />Visible demographics may be the most obvious way panels fail to be diverse, but they aren't the only way. Academic panels are filled with - not surprisingly - academics. And academics themselves tend to share assumptions. They tend to have more stable incomes, to work in positions of authority, and to have freedom to express themselves. And though they believe they have succeeded by dint of their own efforts, they tend to rise from more affluent backgrounds and more privileged groups.<br /><br />Panels within particular disciplines also tend to subscribe to assumptions common in that discipline. Moreover, organizers tend to put like commentators with like. At a recent <a href="file:///C:/Users/downess/Downloads/Visions-Final-Program.pdf">conference</a>, for example, on 'Canada in 2049', the professional journalists were on one panel, the student journalists on another, the historians on another, and proponents of the 'ethics of care' on another. Imagine how interesting it would have been to take one person from each group and create a panel with these four very distinct voices.<br /><br />Diversity has many voices. There are many ways of being different. No single panel can encompass all of them, but the members of the panels should be different from each other, and each panel should be different from the other panels. Pick a topic and find people from completely different perspectives who might have something to say about the topic: not just the academics, but professionals in the field, students, administrators, clients, journalists, whatever.<br /><br /><b>Autonomy</b><br /><b><br /></b>It should go without saying that people should be free on a panel to express their own ideas and perspectives. But there are many ways panelists can be limited in their ability to participate fully, which severely limits the possibilities of the panel.<br /><br />For example, spokespeople or representatives of institutions or corporations find themselves locked into their own organization's talking points. They have a specific message to convey, and it is not their own, so they are not free to diverge from it. This means that it doesn't matter what any other panelist or audience member says, their views cannot be changed. It becomes clear that any idea of such a panel being a dialogue is a pretense.<br /><br />Power relationships can also impede autonomy. I've seen panels where a professor and her students are presenting. The students are constantly looking to the professor for validation. Similarly, a panel with a worker and a manager from the same company (or even the same industry) creates a possibility of reprisals or repercussions from disagreements. Even if they are at very different strata in society, panelists should be selected such that no one panelist can have power over another.<br /><br />The structure of the panel itself can impede autonomy. On many panels I've attended the moderator has wanted to organize participation such that each person presents one aspect or topic within a wider subject, so the panel as a whole could be seen as a single unified whole. Doing so eliminates the possibility of real interaction because there's no possibility of disagreement: the panelists are actually talking about different things.<br /><br />The purpose of a panel isn't to present or cover some body of content. It's to elicit different perspectives or points of view on some problem or issue, and to do so in such a way that the participants' understandings are informed by each others'. The reactions are just as important as the initial positions. Maybe more important. What we want to see in the panel is how each perspective shapes, and is shaped, by the others. That's a dynamic interplay that requires the ability of each panelist to adapt and to respond on the spot, which requires autonomy.<br /><br /><b>Openness</b><br /><br />When we listen to academics talk about openness they're usually talking about whether they can access or use some sort of resource, such as 'open content', 'open source' or 'open educational resource'. But the idea of openness is much broader than that, and most fully conceived, speaks to the breaking down of barriers between the participants among each other, and the panel with the world at large.<br /><br />So many panels exist as intellectual silos, four professors presenting today's version of their own are of interest or study. I've seen many panels consisting of nothing but four short stand-alone presentations. These presentations are impermeable to each other. <i>Maybe</i>&nbsp;the other panelists are listening as one talks, but more likely they're preparing their own commentary.<br /><br />'Openness' in a panel means that you stop talking. It is the idea of making room for the other perspectives (and of them making room for you). Openness means converting from presentations to <i>conversation</i>. There aren't speaking orders, there aren't turns. The key element in a conversation isn't organization or content or subject matter, it's that each person <i>responds</i>&nbsp;to what the other person said. That means listening first.<br /><br />Openness in panel discussions can also mean opening the panel to interventions from the conference participants or even an online audience. By interjecting outside input into the discussion panels can be pushed off prepared messages and talking points, and be forced to consider facts or points of view they hadn't considered. Most panels, when they include participation, do so in a question-and-answer format. But this limits the flow to a single direction.<br /><br />To generate openness in a panel, the idea is to break down the barrier between audience and panel. The audience becomes, if you will, the fifth panelist. Their participation isn't an afterthought, if there's time, but something that is incorporated from the beginning.<br /><br />The idea of openness also applies to perspective. It's a bit like saying "there are no <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-193448,00.html">dumb questions</a>" or "there are no bad ideas" in a <a href="http://www.wikihow.com/Brainstorm">brainstorm</a>. Agree or disagree, every perspective or point of view is valid (it may be <i>wrong</i>, but it's valid). What openness doesn't allow, by implication, is the shutting down of a person or point of view. Openness doesn't mean the same thing as 'say whatever you want'. Threats, slurs, and personal attacks are not part of the picture.<br /><br /><b>Interactivity</b><br /><b><br /></b>Panels are often thought of as some sort of presentation (that's actually how I classify them on my website) but in fact the presentation is the least important part of a panel. What makes a panel work is interactivity.<br /><br />It's a bit of a crude measurement, but a useful rule of thumb: the more times the conversation moves from one person to another, the more interesting the panel. A panel where this number is '3' is the epitome of the boring panel: one person talks, then another, then another, then another, then we're done. For a contrast, listen to a great radio <a href="https://twit.tv/">panel</a> or <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/the-first-hour-of-cbc-radios-last-morningside">interview</a>: the interactivity number is much much higher.<br /><br />If the moderator of a panel does anything, it should be to encourage greater interactivity. It's not to keep panelists 'on topic' or to push the discussion to new points, it's to make sure participants don't ramble without interruption or to provide prompts should the discussion begin to lag. Where the conversation goes should be <i>up to the panelists and the audience</i>, and it should be the result of them listening and responding to each other, rather than planned or choreographed.<br /><br />This is in keeping with the core idea of interactivity: that the outcome of the panel is something more than anyone, or even everyone, had to contribute going into it. The result of a panel is <i>something new</i>&nbsp;that didn't exist before the panel began, and it is created not by one person 'winning' an argument but by the interplay of the various points of view.<br /><br />As mentioned above, the 'rule of thumb' is a crude instrument, and not all conversational transitions are equal. Though difference of opinion are encouraged, the objective of the conversation is to <i>explore</i>&nbsp;these differences rather than settling one one or another point of view as the 'right' one. Interactivity that leads to new ideas and new understandings is the most interesting; the mere repetition of the same point over and over contributes <a href="http://crossfire.blogs.cnn.com/category/debates/">nothing</a>.<br /><br />---<br /><br />People familiar with my writing will no doubt be familiar with these four points; they are the same elements I consider to be essential to the successful function of a learning network. Here I apply them as a case study of how to improve panel discussions. Again, as I have always asserted, these are empirical principles. In the end, it is up to the reader to observe panels for themselves and as whether panels that embrace these principles are better or worse than the alternatives.<br /><br />The subtext of this post is the response to the criticisms of panels outlined in the first few paragraphs. On <i>The Current</i>&nbsp;this morning there was a <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-october-6-2017-1.4342058/u-of-t-students-protest-lack-of-diversity-on-all-white-social-inequality-panel-1.4342329">segment on students protesting</a> the lack of diversity on an all-white social inequality panel. The students are right to protest, of course. But the panel assembled by CBC was no more diverse, consisting as it did of a professor and director of the Women &amp; Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy, and the acting principal of Victoria College. Academics all, speaking from a position of advantage, on how people of disadvantage are being excluded.<br /><br />Sure, sometimes we want to assemble four academics to explore a topic. I doubt that the layperson's perspective on value representation in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-means_clustering">k-means clustering</a>. But conversations, even on such obscure subjects, can be structured to that multiple points of view are relevant: what <i>is</i>&nbsp;a cluster, for example, and how do we know when we've grouped people (or puppies) the right way or the wrong way? Now it matters what non-mathematicians think.<br /><br />In the aggregate, all of these elements are equally important for successful panels, and the omission of one or another in each case represents a specific sort of blindness to form and function in society.<br /><br />https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/10/elements-of-successful-panel.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-4581898740452940207Thu, 28 Sep 2017 14:55:00 +00002017-09-28T10:56:47.014-04:00Education and TrainingWe're reorganizing again and I was recently asked about my education and training. I wasn't sure exactly what to submit but here's what I came up with:<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><b>Philosophy</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - (BA, MA, and an ABD (PhD studies, 'All But Dissertation' completed))<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;- Teaching philosophy: 10 years (University of Alberta, Athabasca University, Grande Prairie Regional College)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><b>Media and Journalism</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - various training courses &amp; conferences, including graphic design, news writing, editing<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - 5 years experiences, including 2 years as editor of a 20K circulation weekly<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - Online news sites include NewsTrolls, Moncton Free Press, 19 years publishing the OLDaily newsletter<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - French language training at NRC (includes classes and tutorial session), certified bilingual<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - Various online photography courses / portfolio of 35K photos on Flickr<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><b>Education</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;- training – various courses toward the Certificate in Adult Education (CAE), Manitoba (we then developed courses in CAE for online delivery)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;- numerous seminars and workshops through attendance at some 400 conferences on the subject<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - teaching experience (noted above) plus development and delivery of novel-format online courses<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><b>Computer Technology</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - training – 1 year of Algonquin College computer science, plus another year (via night school) at SAIT <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;- in-house training at Texas Instruments (including formal courses and instruction on geophysical data processing, remote job entry and networks, communications); then developed training program <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;- taught myself ML/Assembler and C (using Borland Turbo), BASIC (using Microsoft training program), Perl (using O’Reilly series), Python (using Codecademy training system), Javascript/JQuery (using W3C schools)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - I developed a range of other skills in web technologies, too much to list<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><b>Leadership</b><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp; - Former board member: University of Alberta, Athabasca University (received in-house Board training, including&nbsp;</span><span style="color: #1f497d;">formal mediation training</span><span style="color: #1f497d;">)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp;- Former shop steward (Hotel, Restaurant and Tavern Workers Local 237) and negotiations (CUEW), received in-house representation and bargaining training<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp; - Various program and project management courses at NRC (about 7 or 8 in all, I didn’t keep track and apparently neither did NRC)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1f497d;">&nbsp;&nbsp; - Experienced project &amp; program leader<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I tried to think of more, but that's about it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/09/education-and-training.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes)0